I Love to Write
She squats on the apex of the world, and looks as if she might have birthed it. The wind lifting up straggles of her hair, mostly grey with streaks of brown. Her breasts hang empty, having fed her living children, some of whom remain there, in the villages below. The sky has penetrated her mind and visions pass like clouds upon her inner sight. She looks like an idiot, mouth slack and hanging, eyes having turned inward.
She has not always been a mother. She has been a child. She has been a daughter. But further back, she has been a son, a father.
Lower down on the slope she can hear a bear as it wanders through the pines, searching for berries. She has been this too. There is no separation. At the end of this life, all other lives seem to be bleeding into one another. She can see him too, a bright thread passing through the water, quicksilver, and she's back at the prow of a boat the salt sea drenching her face as she laughs into the future. She's curled by the fire, half wrapped in blankets, unfurling in simple feline sensuality.
Like a magnet she finds herself drawn to him again and again and she watches as his life unfolds. Taking a voyeuristic pleasure in drawing close to him. Surreptitiously she slips her hand into his as he is standing looking out into the bay, she dives under covers to smile at him as he is hiding, intent in some game or sorrow. She even slips inside him when he is kissing a love, feels through him the wonder of physical intimacy and touching a woman, before she flows out and into yet another world, another setting.
Nothing is lost and yet nothing can be held.
In this one the heat of the sun is warm on her back, which is bent from years of physical labor. She doesn't know how the sun has baked her skin into a warm leather parchment. When she smiles her face crinkles into a lifetime of stories. Her eyes shine. She is moving up the slope, to the cottage they share, coming home to him.
The woman on the cliff is crying but she has no awareness of the tears rolling down her cheeks. She must pass from this life having never known him. She wonders what crime has parted them and if in the next life, she'll be able to find him. To go home to his arms. And with that thought she gets go of the world and her breath. Above her body the birds wheel in circles and will soon descend to impartially eat away her eyes, and all that they have seen, her womb, which has brought forth life, and the flesh of her lips, even now curled into the tenderest of smiles.
She has not always been a mother. She has been a child. She has been a daughter. But further back, she has been a son, a father.
Lower down on the slope she can hear a bear as it wanders through the pines, searching for berries. She has been this too. There is no separation. At the end of this life, all other lives seem to be bleeding into one another. She can see him too, a bright thread passing through the water, quicksilver, and she's back at the prow of a boat the salt sea drenching her face as she laughs into the future. She's curled by the fire, half wrapped in blankets, unfurling in simple feline sensuality.
Like a magnet she finds herself drawn to him again and again and she watches as his life unfolds. Taking a voyeuristic pleasure in drawing close to him. Surreptitiously she slips her hand into his as he is standing looking out into the bay, she dives under covers to smile at him as he is hiding, intent in some game or sorrow. She even slips inside him when he is kissing a love, feels through him the wonder of physical intimacy and touching a woman, before she flows out and into yet another world, another setting.
Nothing is lost and yet nothing can be held.
In this one the heat of the sun is warm on her back, which is bent from years of physical labor. She doesn't know how the sun has baked her skin into a warm leather parchment. When she smiles her face crinkles into a lifetime of stories. Her eyes shine. She is moving up the slope, to the cottage they share, coming home to him.
The woman on the cliff is crying but she has no awareness of the tears rolling down her cheeks. She must pass from this life having never known him. She wonders what crime has parted them and if in the next life, she'll be able to find him. To go home to his arms. And with that thought she gets go of the world and her breath. Above her body the birds wheel in circles and will soon descend to impartially eat away her eyes, and all that they have seen, her womb, which has brought forth life, and the flesh of her lips, even now curled into the tenderest of smiles.
