Boy and Girl in a Field
“I dislike certain flowers,” she said. “Zinnias
in particular, and dahlias, and most things
brash and orange.” Some time later,
crossing the meadow, he realized
none of these flowers could represent her.
She was a patch of unassuming pale-blue
and cream-colored wildflowers, the sort
so numerous and understated, they’re mostly
overlooked. And he was gripped by an urge
to study them closely, to pronounce their
Latin names as well as their common ones—
and still he was no closer to an understanding
of asters. “The slightest smudge renders
a butterfly flightless,” she said. And so
he halted while nearing a mock monarch
who’d paused on wild fennel. From a distance
and without the aid of a net, he’d surmise
its erratic patterns of flight. “Clouds beg
to be named,” she said, after which
he could never flatten grass and stare
at a cloudscape without seeing a seahorse
or a Dungeness crab or squid tentacles, all
evaporating into flaxen hair. And because “clouds
never repeat themselves,” these were the last
sea creatures of their kind to form below an azure sky.
~ Soundings East – 2009
Double Happiness
She desired above all to convert her arms into talons, her ruinous legs into expansive wings and soar at cloud level. After she spoke, he retold a recurrent dream in boyhood in which he’d levitate just long enough to hurdle telephone wires that sagged across his street. His desire above all was to inhabit the interior of books where his dull speech might span the emotional gap between noise and sound, glance and glare, pain and agony. After which, she explained how pain mangles a body physically; whereas, agony obliterates desire. Later, neighbors spotted them ambling down a road over cracked pavement toward a cul-de-sac. They heard him reading aloud from a book composed entirely of transitive verbs, while she threaded telephone wires and scattered pale doves in a moment of pure solitude, pure flight.
~ Soundings East – 2008
Epiphany
Her acupuncturist told her she’d evolved from dolphins. This made sense. For her, water had become nourishment—the only space through which she moved freely and without pain. She could envision herself without legs, without arms, without long stretches of uneven pavement to traverse. She could see her body sleek and swift, leaping from waves, containing the shapes of a sickle or waxing and waning moons. She could feel herself cavorting in the surf, revealed in a jade window moments before sea froth collapsed around her. Dolphins were once thought to transport souls from the physical world to a realm of nebulous shades. And so he feared for years spending weeks at the seashore, where she’d meander wet sands at low tide, where she’d ingest ocean smells and the sonorous assembling and dismantling of waves. At any moment, he realized, she might plunge into cobalt waters and return to her kind.
~ The Bitter Oleander – 2008
© Gregory W Randall 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Gregory W Randall with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
