All the while, this hysterical light.
A courtyard fountain: the picture
of tranquility. And then
its progeny of reflected sunbeams.
The way they move and flash
they make the whole house uneasy.
The sliced cheese lies motionless
on its plate. The puppies, entering
the room, whimper and turn tail.
The puppies! Even
the pillows crowd to the corners of the sofa.
The mind stills, balks. On the shelf
the books close more tightly
around their sentences.
And the light goes on
with all its vigor, its oil
and vinegar,
sloshing and shimmying, de-
meaning the room.
B. Bergson Spiro (1910–1965), who after the publication of her first novel The Mere Living (1933) wrote under her married name Betty Miller, was an Irish-Anglo novelist, scholar, critic, and journalist (and a relative of Henri Bergson). She is the author of the biography Robert Browning: A Portrait (1952) and served as editor of collection of a letters from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to fellow writer Mary Russell Mitford (1954). In addition to her novels, she published in literary journals including Horizon, The Adelphi, The Cornhill Magazine and The Twentieth Century. Of her seven novels published during her lifetime, two have been reprinted: Farewell, Leicester Square (1941), by Persephone Books in 2000, and On the Side of the Angels (1945) by Capuchin Classics in 2012.
