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lycanthrope
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it is hard to tell you about the jocandas or whatever flower they are,
which line the road and grove, and are often pale violet,
thinner than paper, a color human hands have never reached,
and often in the spring look like a woman unfolding her arms
from across a schoolyard, waiting to embrace the little girl,
the way home becomes a foreign city
to a traveller. i am impatient
to have to tell you about even the cobbled road
with its stones uneven eges, placed down the way we set
plans down for a moment
and forget to correct them, the way our books become
placemats for our cups
of tea,
or the chest full of our journals
becomes an unadorned table.
it is this road on which when younger she saw her father stumble and fall upon
when she ran to meet him,
and how her previously bloodless father's knee
had unfurled crimson like a dragon kite,
skiing down through the hair of his shins
and burrowing into his china white
socks,
and how strange it had been, like breaking open a grain of sand
and finding a tiny flame,
or a bird's mouth opening and words coming
in place of song
and how it had changed the road completely.
it saddens me to be weighed down even in describing the room
which she now kneels on the hard tile obsidian floor
of like a resigned exhalation, like a scarecrow limply praying,
as a simple now unfurnished sitting room.
it seems as if all of that, that even the letter
on white rice paper standing against the coal obsidian
like a single piano key
filled as it is with insufficient explanations and abstract nouns,
no ransom for the return of her heart,
and a signature even still boring and familiar
is unimportant since she is weeping,
which seems essential.
i want to tell you immediately that she is weeping, has been weeping.
i want to show you her. i wanted to take you right to her from the beginning,
her weeping which was what our hearts suspected from the opening lines.
and yet really, everyone already knows that she is weeping, and has been weeping.
but without the road, there is no way of reaching her,
without the jocandas there is no reprieve,
nothing to say to her
which might turn her tears back to rain,
which might return her from that distance that cannot be spoken,
to the color, the smell, the touch that can.
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