Open them at any page, on any scene, God is doing his good cop/bad cop routine. SG McInerney

A morning soaking in the windowpane like a photograph, dripping with ablution from its last bath, and lifted to the line; details drying in their resolution - wattle; mountain sloping to the ocean; six lorikeets who've drifted off the plain. The scene emerges after early rain alive in the wintry sunshine. These are the mornings that I love the most - to watch all this, warm coffee in the palm, a pile of books, the plump, unopened post - at ease with what has been and what's t

The weekend gone, the emptied bins are out. Another night of icy wind and rain. Stormwater rushes past towards the drain, With beer-like head of suds, Band Aid packet, A Kmart catalogue and someone's mail - Those soaked pages relieved of their detail. A love letter perhaps: someone's devotion Poured onto the page. Or bills. Either way, The ink flows out again towards the ocean Where nothing falls in love or has to pay. Beneath dark clouds the sea is inky blue, As though fille

The maples are relinquishing their load And down a rustling way Two schoolgirls after school twirl off the road, Release their hair and start the holiday. The freedom of an afternoon, the ease With which the wind sifts through The crispily-fried gold of maple trees Ensnares them in the changing point of view. Wind-teased, they brush about the fallen leaves While, further on, a man Observes his son, their father, tossing sheaves Of warped-and-broken lengths into the van. Alone

Shot like an arrow through quivering distance, not caring for the target, simply glad to be released from the tense, drawn bow of one moment and the next, we are making our journey. At first, crossing the border, an afternoon of glassy heat, of stickily-gripping tyres hurrying beneath over smooth, flickering miles. The sealed concrete highway is flecked with tiny crystals like the twinkling pins-and-needles in boot-bound, swollen feet. Curling in my socks, my numb toes uproot

A wave's about to break against the shore; by now it's given all that we will have, ending here, but promising so much more. As though a drawknife worked by a carpenter curled it from willow, with a single shave, a wave's about to break against the shore. It lifts against the limits we deplore, of gravity and time - and yet it gave the feeling that it could have carried more. Unable to withstand the weight it bore, it holds our gaze till all those watching crave to save it fr

I had not thought before of the wind's longing, how it always seems in seach of something lost, like a cloud set down on a green hill at evening, or a letter trembling in a young woman's hand, going about the world in search of this one thing, day after day, year after year, as ghosts might do; setting chairs cartwheeling from cafes in the street, tearing down powerlines, lifting up roofs, refusing to countenance any secret places where the source of its deep sorrowing might

The lives we live in other people's minds shadow our own, are cast by what we do - and yet are different, too - not ours at all; the lives we might have lived except we did not, knowing that we lived them, half aware at best of the tempestuous affair that never was, except as happened there in someone else's mind, half false, half true. You watch those shadows play against the wall, the moonlight in between them; restless winds hurrying through the trees, the moon half-hid; a

It begins with little more than the turning of a page, noticing the fridge humming, a flower in a glass, a ball of loose string on the sill, the drip of a tap left running. This sudden awareness of empty space deeper than the sky in the back window. A single day, a measurement like flour in bushels. Or cups. Something that we know is there, if we are. Hour by hour falling through our hands, sifted through the clock. This waiting. This need to turn the kettle off and on. To bu