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They send the girl each morning to gather firewood. She stands in the place where the trees stood, shaking – the gasp of pits, the quiet: stunned
fits of burning on sharp sand – and such wounded heat lifting from the white surface. She could bake bread, boil water, without fire.
Her face, her belly, stings – the air flails – heat winds invisible candles, white shadows. Twisted sisal bites into her fingers –
if she could only fasten its long coils round the air, bundle by bundle. She holds the rope, loops it in emptiness, knots it.
The threads shiver, part, run like water, chased lightning in the prickled palms of her hands.
The thread drops, still burning, where he lies fused to the sand, pale glass, a crystal shadow blown to shattering in the dunes.
The flame dances, runs, and the skin of glass cracks – water that had forgotten it was knit up like seas. He cries out
as the fissure opens up along the lines of his shoulder. The edge of his half-turned face lifts from the sand, and the girl sees him – a man of ice.
She looks at him as if at a dream of angels. Bones of his wings fall from him: leavings of flight drop like silver coins onto a plate.
He comes to her more than naked, a moving glass. She looks through the refracted distance he sheds, the cut-out sand, and he coming at her
like a lit shade, like a correction of her vision. The space behind him magnifies. His entry is sharp, cold, and her unbroken blood
stains like roses held against the light. And it is he who cries out, breaks; his prick lodged, a crystal finger, inside her.
The white house; is where it always was in the dream the road behind twisting into its own double bend. But I am coming from the other side, walking towards my self, still out of sight.
I stare at the reflection of the dream uncurling itself from sleep, sitting up in its coffin, easing into motion. A stone on the wall freezes into a wrinkled apprehension; the road cracks into widening black veins.
I back off, turn, afraid to glance over my shoulder to where, behind, someone who looks like me is striding out, passing the white house, closing the gap.
Is it the rain or tears clawing at the low horizon, shaking the green to grey monochrome? Tyre-splash haze from exhausted lorries cries out. Is it an elegy, Green Man, Heath Man? Or a visitation, haunting – a touch, tug on the sleeve, to tell, spell us out, crackling with the horror of it, how it was, how it is, grey-green mist, for you.
Left, have they, the nymphs, the young men departed, run off, cries winding in to laughter or terror. Each one tears from his head, hers, the wild rose. Thorns catch – do they? – their hair, drag it into painted currents, the dogs barking, the men blowing into a buisine, horses rearing from green and gold pages.......................
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