Careening. A snowflake
I float. I tumble. See!
Towards disintegration
But it was beautiful
All the way down and down
Should we never become more than today
We shall honor the hope of tomorrow
And in wishing and planning, we become
More than the sum of all our sorrows
What we shall think of the other in time
A portrait, a beacon, of beauty, light
And regard will grow as never it would
Should we remain in the other’s dear sight
‘Til nothing remains but our finest selves
And in pining, as dreaming, love creates
A sparkling vision of perfection, grand
A constancy no time ever abates
The Trap
When the girl was young, her grandfather would set traps. On spring afternoons, She’d run from the bus to a certain patch of grass. There, she would throw herself down on her stomach, and press her child’s fingers against a tiny metal cage. Her breath would go, her eyes would cloud, and the young heart inside her would race and race. Some days, a set of eyes would meet her own.
In general the routine would go like this: panic, take a few huge breaths, scout the area at a scamper for onlookers, then one, two, three: Release. “Run! Run!” the girl would cheer in her mind. And all alone, she would surely do a few little jumps of joy as the squirrel ran and ran. It was no secret that the girl was releasing the squirrels, upsetting the delicate balance of her grandmother’s bird feeders. But since girls will be girls, they turned a blind eye. That’s how it went most days.
Every so often, she would feel an irrepressible urge to touch a squirrel. Peering through the wires at something frightened to the brink of madness, the girl would feel kinship. Her little fingers would slip, almost all on their own, toward the brown bristled fur. “Shhhh. Shhhhh,” she would whisper to the squirrel and herself. “Shhhh.”
For a moment peace would settle between them. Then, the child’s finger would cross the too-close distance between curiosity and danger. In a second, her finger would feel a pinch that elevated to a crunch. To the girl , it would feel like an eternity before release. But she would wait in pained patience. Squeezing her eyes and lips into control, the child would keep down a yelp. Her tears were another thing. She cried not from the pain, which was miserable, but from the pitiful, shameful, knowledge that she had known better.
And so it came to pass that the child became an adult. The girl was much unchanged in substance as is often the case with people. She still scampered about before doing something she shouldn’t. She still cheered in her mind. She did not often visit the old house where the wire cages sat rusting, unused.
The girl liked to believe that she had grown a great deal. She would recall many things about her youth and laugh at her foolishness. Her friends loved to hear stories about her country upbringing, so she told about the ducks in the pond, the chickens in the coop, the dog and the cats and the rabbits, but never of the squirrels.
One day, while the girl was taking notes in a very difficult college class, a pair of eyes met her own. Her eyes clouded and her heart raced and raced. The boy and the girl considered each other for many months, perhaps even a year. They would study one another across the table at dinners, side-by-side at the theatre, late at night in bed. The girl could sense that something was wrong with the boy. And she wanted so very much to help him, so very much. After all, she understood some things about life.
The girl’s friends, the same ones that loved stories of her country life, did not approve of the boy. It wasn’t anything in particular. Nothing like that at all. In fact, he was good-looking and his wounded spirit made him lovely really. The girl knew the boy. He made her heart race and race.
To be continued…
Silicone spectators
Love the woman she’s not
Gluttons and thieves, they smile
Leading her onward. Lost.
