Michael John Pickering's speaker stops in the dark, and the night stops with him: "The autumn night halts as I halt." The moon, "my gaoler", keeps watch, so from the first lines remembering feels less like a choice than a sentence being served. The speaker looks once more at "grandma's place", and the two similes that follow explain how. Memory is "like a tongue that feels the gaps between teeth", a compulsive probing of what is missing, and "like fingertips on my face", the way a blind person learns a face by touch. In both, the house is known through the body rather than the eye.
The second stanza builds that bodily memory out of ordinary things. The scarf carries "its odour of hair and the sweat of her brow", and grandad's windcheater is "stuck with fish scales". The door handle has an "aluminium voice", and coffee and tobacco hang in the air. The list speeds up, and then the voice breaks into delight: "in the oven, roast hare!" The exclamation mark is the child's, not the adult's. Even the yard light is seen with a child's logic, "hunched up in the puddle / like an embryo", an image of a small, curled, unborn thing that makes the whole scene feel like a place before birth. The only colour is the speaker's own "red boots", a bright detail in a mostly lamplit world.
Then come two flat lines: "Clock time didn't exist, / money had no value." They are bare, almost proverbial, and they name what this childhood house was: a place outside the adult economy of hours and prices. The cows are "gentle as could be", and the speaker wishes aloud that "my verses / could breathe with their breathing". That is the poem's quiet statement of its own ambition, to be as unforced as an animal's breath. The lowercase "if" after a full stop makes the wish spill out rather than arrive as a finished sentence.
The last stanza turns on a word the poem has already planted. At the start the night "halts"; now the wind is "still", both "yet" and "motionless", and the warmth of the catalogue is gone. The wind is "unembraced" and shrinks to a sob in the "closed yard". The poem never explains the Wolf's Bride who "wanders / and seeks her beloved", and it is better left that way. She reads as a folk-tale figure of endless searching, a ghost of longing haunting the empty property. The house itself is damaged: the stove wall is "cracked / by a black streak of lightning", and the "faded curtains, wings without angels, / swing in the cold blast." This is the title's image, and it is a good one. Curtains flap like wings, but the protectors who should live inside them are missing. Judging by the closed yard and the cold, the people who made the house safe are gone, though the poem lets us infer this rather than stating it.
The ending is the hardest to read. "How the moss would embrace me!" is a wish to be taken in by the earth, the way moss covers old stone. Then comes the stark "Listen, I shall die / before my mother", a reversal of the natural order, said almost casually. The final lines, "Take me. More you'll never get. / Now.", sound like a bargain struck with death, or with the moon-gaoler, or with the Wolf's Bride herself. The poem leaves the addressee open. The single word "Now" stands alone and ends the poem without comfort.
Everything here is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. The ragged indentation of some lines looks like hesitant steps or a thought catching, and the line lengths change with the mood: long and slow in the first stanza, breathless in the list, clipped and urgent at the end. What makes the poem memorable is that it first builds the grandparents' house so lovingly, from smell, sound and touch, and then shows how grief empties it. The memory is a refuge and a prison at once, and the speaker cannot leave it.