Such Fears - for Amy Your letter describes
your eyes as speckled eggs and crows feet, tells me how after work you hunker down into a plastic lawn chair surrounded by barberry and may apple, warblers chiding from pine branches, and
watch the slow pulse-click of beetles scurrying on concrete. It's hard to imagine you there as dusk begins its ritual of shadow and sun releasing a swell of mosquitoes into Alabama air, and how you shy away from the childrens'
songs about you, the ghost woman they glimpse through a window of chain link fence. To
tell the truth, I know nothing about such fears--I have a hard enough time understanding the particulars of skin; how sweat beads on my upper lip when the sun bleeds through my window, or how I feel separate of
it when you talk of love, the gentle sizzle a drop of coffee on a hot plate. Here January is thick
with ice and all of Terre Haute seems suspicious of cold. Even the neighborhood boys usually bundled and waddling through snow are hiding indoors. This season always takes me to our talks over coffee and the store bought potpourri on the stove. Outside, the snow is a far reaching silence. Sometimes I catch myself talking out loud listening for some return, some echo of my life to barrel back into my ears.
I think of you in that stalled Buick in Royal Oak, the pop of rain, the steamed windows; I think of walks with mosquitoes taking a little of us away, and of finger-dances, and the silences of our lives beginning to claim us. When dusk settles around the ankles of my house like fallen clothes, I picture my neighbors sweeping dead flies off sills, looking at the white stillness that is our town, and thinking about nothing except that urge to take their lover's fingers in their
mouths. Right now I'm sure you're listening to those soprano voices hiding in the high grass just beyond your porch and wanting an answer to the question you asked me: have you ever tasted pure happiness? Amy, I haven't caught a snowflake on my tongue in years. |
