dryad's recall

I had forgotten the smell of dying leaves...

I had forgotten until my feet passed over the crumpled brown fallouts, bruising out the smell.

I had forgotten how long this had lain in me like winter.

I have been waiting many days for that smell to come back to me;

I have been watching for the change of color, the bite of air, for many days.

I had forgotten how I wish to shed my leaves, to burn out like a candle in an old forest.

It is my home, the dying in damp brown hollows like familiar haunting hands,

I have been waiting all the burning summer to die so cool and dark.

And every nymph remembers the Golden Ages; I recall the Grey-and-Brown.

I had forgotten leaf mold streaked down my arms, damp dark leaves against my neck.

The cold, dry sun spreads it's light out;

this is the man I will lie down with.

J<&>W

My own hands pressed against the revolving door, but my nerves were cuddled deep inside my palms, and I felt nothing but a faint surprise that someone was turning the door.

I am a lover of certainty, and I could not be sure of anything.

Rain has always walked the most curtained moments of my life- rain and no umbrella. My hair stood out in little curls furred over with mist from the almost-invisible drizzle. I bit my lip around the details, and thought reasonlessly about my shoes on the polished floor and my hands hiding away from me and my hair carrying in the mist and my eyes and what they might see.

10 A.M. The clock was like a person overdressed on the wall, giving out uselessness with the ceremony of life-and-death. I blew it a kiss with my scattered mind, and advance on the lobby. The wind does not blow in here; it is humid like me.

I have little halls in my body, unopened windows, old secrets. 10:10 A.M. and no one is here to open up my chest.

I half suspected this. My hands are little huddled people around my neck.
--
10:15 A.M. He is here. He looks different than before. His hair does not move so much.

War kissed his body back maybe to something like it was before. Real war. My hair curls into my eyes, but I was long ago ripped off my interest in scarlet sashes, so I let it fall.

I wonder if he will speak. I wonder if we still know how to speak.

He puts his fingers against his fingers; he never used to do that. I tilt my head at him. My lips bite out details: a scar on his wrist, a scar in his eye, the rain falling harder against the gilt-framed window. My own hand tightening on the arm of the chair, the carving pressing into the pale skin of my wrist. My wrist are not so young as they were. The skin slips around in wrinkles when my eyes are tired from a long day. I sometimes walk around a ruined white pyramid.

"Hello," he says. No name for me, not since names began to mean something more than a word inverted on itself and cut away into nothing. His voice talks out of his mouth like he has stitches in his lungs, but I am not sorry, because before, it talked out of foreign lungs that I had in my own chest.

"Hello," I say. No name for him, because his old name is hard and twisted like scar tissue from 1984. I am sick to death of scar tissue. I stand up. I am not young, but my body aged well and my hair is pretty with mist; I wore the dress I knew he would like. I stand up, and it is like the untying of a scarlet sash.

Pockets Full Of Coffee Beans (And Other Reasons To Read Something Else)

Under the cliffhanging cover of a ledge of roof, the girl in the slate-grey sweater glanced down at her feet. Held one foot up in the orangeish glow of the shop-lights. Her shoes were terribly interesting and impractical; she was up to her ankles in cold water. Water sluiced down the drainpipes and spilled over the edges of the eavestroughs, spattering against the ground uncolored paint. The streets were streaked with reflected light, the cars flashed by like fish.

She was late; motions of her wrist and eyes and lips speculated about getting wet and precluded the possibility of the rain ending. Sound and blackness splashed out onto the street, and she looked back and forth, pushing back damp strands of her hair.

She was twenty-four. Born May 16, 1983. She was a walker; she looked over her shoulder at you and was gone. She had learned without watching about langour and slanted looks, the motions of eyes and wrists and lips. She was a taker, but whenever her thoughts remembered themselves, she tried to give. No one knew her middle name.

She looked after an umbrella-ed man, agonized, made a wish, and blew out her candles. Her shoes shone with water as she ran lightly across the street and disappeared into the people of the city. She was a walker; she looked over her shoulder at you and was gone before you could ask about her name.

New-Wave Part I: Life

Sometimes you can taste songs echoing in your head, the kind of music that makes you walk differently, fills your eyes up with new-wave colors and animates your hands like sheet music.

Like life is something that gets put into you in doses. You could be my pharmacist.

June 24th is a good day, one you might remember if you lived in it. Some things are like revolving doors always coming back to the axis, sliding doors always meeting again in the middle, swinging doors always turning on one point.

Like life is something lived for and after some date. You could be my June 24th.

Watercolor paintings make pretty splashes of green, blue, pink, yellow, red as they dissolve on rainy pavement. They take the meaning of their whole and break into pieces of color, pulp and beauty on the hard ground.

Like life is something that takes it's color and substance from diffraction. You could be the one who destroyed into me color.

Like Life is a friend who walks beside you, pointing to colors and humming you songs, laughing in the rain that clings to your eyelashes, glass beads that left the papers in soft pieces.

My God In A Windowpane

The rain is distorting the enclosure of the blue-grey world into circles of wideness. It is too dark to see, but not dark enough for lights, and so the small clouded world is giving me recognitions, erstwhiles, perhapses, to pass the time. There are no shadows, or it is all shadows. The sidewalk is a slate of water. The street is a river. Wrought iron gleams with black-wetness.

I find my God in a windowpane.

Rasheed is walking into Mecca and he can hardly breath. Dusky cheeks burned, eyes open wider than he knew they opened. The dust is a kiss, and he is part of something more beautiful than he dared dream, more beautiful than he knew he could endure. He is a simple soul, and he is coughing and breathing with beautiful things for his prophet. His imagination fails him, and he walks half-uncomphrehending through the swirl of sweating, glorying pilgrims. The dust is a kiss on his dark lips. There is intricate stone and waiting bodies and everyone feeding each other, feeding each other, calling out.

I find my God in a window.

The web is like grey death, decay. Head down hangs the spider, rocking with the wind, waiting for flying things to feed on. Wolfish litters of leftover pieces, but the frost is coming; the spider can feel death crawling up on it. Death has fangs like a black widow, many legs and many ways of approaching. Morning will see the spider withered into a curled-leg ball amid the ice-laced grass, and the web will break free into useless strands. In the next life, the spider will be a beautiful grey star-thing, stroking it's pointed legs against the sky. The spider will die and the spider will crawl away.

I find my God in a windowpane.