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The Eclectic Pen - You Fled to Drink Water

By: Eva L. (wearetrees)   + 37 more  
Date Submitted: 9/22/2008
Last Updated: 11/4/2008
Genre: Literature & Fiction » Poetry
Words: 423
Rating:

I thought it over. It makes perfect sense to me. It was you all along, despite the shadow dodging recognition, insistent in its shroud. I wanted to feel full, useful like a parachute, a pyre. You burrowed in my thighs, my lungs caught fire. By the light of the sky I held you, swallowed your signals like cake, uncovered dense passages in your tissues and cells. Words that weren't words. We can fly by night. This sense of emptiness, it's just the weight of exhalation. A picnic, a comedy! Every second can inspire, can kick up stones. Perhaps that was the point, to define the diggers among the dirt, divert attention. Stage the play. Then someone stole your tent poles and I watched the whole thing billow down over your face. Your fine feathers, your fat cocoon. I thought it over. Tried to place you in proper context, locate your life, be your boundary. That night I passed through my bed, drank the blankets. Sketched the details of your anatomy in my sleep. I had a dream involving water. The river was a bible, its hair my cedar bridge. We shall become porous, benign, you said, learn to digest the living earth, labor to eat it whole - the skin, the pulp, the bitter seed. I imagined you a staircase. You started climbing, the gravel giving way. Then a wild coyote. You sat thick in your skin, then fled to drink water. A passerby. A muse. One octave higher and there could have been some decent harmony! My voice was stranded, allergic to growth, ribs in ruins. Words that weren't words. I thought it over. It's a little hard to swallow. You weren't really there. I must have imagined your hunger, braided the bread and perfumed it, pretended your eyes were the almonds. You were simply following instructions, weren't you, obeying the vagrant wind, the murmur deep within. So I cried and I've ceased to cry. I love my life, or pretend to, pluck the strings, bruise my fingers like a carpenter. Tomorrow I'll borrow a sickle, ply the hearth that surrounds me. Lend my bloodline, bribe the moon. It's funny except that it's strange. I visit these planes in disguise. In plastic attire, in prose. A winter's burr tugging at my life, skin fragrant like a wildfire. Moss finds its way into the womb, the hidden basket. I am awed by this, flooded. A simple, sudden possession. A crook, a niche, an emblem. I am yours again - the fertile soil, the supper bowl.

The Eclectic Pen » All Stories by Eva L. (wearetrees)

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