Post by ELISE MONET on Sept 3, 2012 14:32:53 GMT -5
She hears the wanton laughter of children, the little toes slipping through the grass, sliding belly first straight into the summer breeze and catching there, staying.very.still.before they.leap back windwards with hide-and-go-seek I-found-you’s and two-minutes-left-Johnny’s and just-a-little-longer-Mom-please’s. Sometimes she wonders what growing up with them would be like, whether grass and mud in the toes makes a difference when someone is five or six or seven and it’s all they’ve ever known. She used to hide in bookshelves. Or cupboards or closets or bathtubs, and wait and watch out windows and wonder, maybe, but never wish for going out there. She watched hawks, sometimes.
Now, in this picnic park from her barefooted bench with her book in her lap she sees one too, just across the way and under the wind, dipping with the dripdrop sunclouds of late afternoon and searching, she can feel, for the something on the ground that crawled, sniffed and wriggled its way among the sticks and leaves and stones. It wasn’t the sticks or the leaves or the grass she felt but the breath, the beat of a small, prick-sized living heart, beating somewhere unawares, safe enough to sniff and nibble and fetch. And then she could sense the thing from above, the beast or the mother or the father which would deal the final card or maybe she was just imagining it all, she after all cannot deal with the doing—that belongs to the heart of another. Someone close, she thinks. She can feel it in the dewgrass of the air and the snowcaps on the breeze, the somethings calling from the deserts she knows do not belong here, though she has never seen them. So then, there is a somethingsomeone else. Like the boy with the watch who finds her at duckponds and drifts onto seconds there is someone, here, now, new to this place who has been here before and will stay here again even after she leaves. And do they know her? Or themselves, or the way the grass and leaves will bend around them when they walk? It’d be a beautiful thing to know that was you. And then, she thinks, it would also be terrifying. And cold and cruel and empty, perhaps, as she sometimes feels.
It dives then—the hawk—and she feels the beat of something stopping not so far off but she smiles, shuts the book held gently in her lap and sighs, ankles crossed into the dirt beneath her feet. And the children play to her left and her right and they wander home, or they will, and there they will grow and they will die one day, perhaps in another home beside someone breathing, and she will pick them up and carry them in her arms or hold their hands and lead them, children, with their little mouse-ish hearts and gone and dried and whole, away to somewhere darker and filled with starshine. And she wonders for a moment whether this othersomeone will do the same for the hawks and the mice and the rats of the world, or whether they fly to elsewhere on pigeon wings.
outfit
Now, in this picnic park from her barefooted bench with her book in her lap she sees one too, just across the way and under the wind, dipping with the dripdrop sunclouds of late afternoon and searching, she can feel, for the something on the ground that crawled, sniffed and wriggled its way among the sticks and leaves and stones. It wasn’t the sticks or the leaves or the grass she felt but the breath, the beat of a small, prick-sized living heart, beating somewhere unawares, safe enough to sniff and nibble and fetch. And then she could sense the thing from above, the beast or the mother or the father which would deal the final card or maybe she was just imagining it all, she after all cannot deal with the doing—that belongs to the heart of another. Someone close, she thinks. She can feel it in the dewgrass of the air and the snowcaps on the breeze, the somethings calling from the deserts she knows do not belong here, though she has never seen them. So then, there is a somethingsomeone else. Like the boy with the watch who finds her at duckponds and drifts onto seconds there is someone, here, now, new to this place who has been here before and will stay here again even after she leaves. And do they know her? Or themselves, or the way the grass and leaves will bend around them when they walk? It’d be a beautiful thing to know that was you. And then, she thinks, it would also be terrifying. And cold and cruel and empty, perhaps, as she sometimes feels.
It dives then—the hawk—and she feels the beat of something stopping not so far off but she smiles, shuts the book held gently in her lap and sighs, ankles crossed into the dirt beneath her feet. And the children play to her left and her right and they wander home, or they will, and there they will grow and they will die one day, perhaps in another home beside someone breathing, and she will pick them up and carry them in her arms or hold their hands and lead them, children, with their little mouse-ish hearts and gone and dried and whole, away to somewhere darker and filled with starshine. And she wonders for a moment whether this othersomeone will do the same for the hawks and the mice and the rats of the world, or whether they fly to elsewhere on pigeon wings.
outfit
