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I study the curve of my waist in the glass, note how my weight is settling on my hips, my thighs rounding nicely under them, my flat feet splaying out.
You would see a woman ageing, you’d attribute my appearance to a shrinking of the spine, too little exercise.
Ha! Don’t you know how mirrors fib? I see the mermaid lurking there, I sense the hardening of my feet, the scaling up of skin.
I wonder will I learn to sing like wind inside a shell? And when at last I spawn — my hips so wide, so full — what is it will emerge?
She did it in snowdrop season when the future was shut off by snow, when the earth was cramped, cold and barren, her heart like a black frozen pond.
She did it in snowdrop season, among those cold, icy blooms in the snow, the green hearts within the white hidden, her own heart as bitter as sloe.
And her blood there, staining the snowdrops, like bright berries crushed against snow. She lay there, so white among them, her body all frozen and closed.
Still. Very still. Among snowdrops. All broken, those bloodied white blossoms – I cannot endure them now.
Sunday. No sun.
Sunday.
Numb day, non-day, no day at all day,
Sunday ends.
At last.
At last, the last of Sunday.
Thank God:
Sunday, gone day, done day.
We’re speaking of how, by some osmotic process after death, we might become a whispering of leaf, a feather’s vane, though we know there is only now — this moment of grey cloud resting on the shoulders of the sky, a yellow burst of sun-rays groping through like a lost actor fumbling at the curtains on a stage, and peace before the drone of homing traffic starts.
Outside a leaf on a tree is a leaf on a tree, the vane of a feather only that. As the dark hauls in the night and the slow blur of stars comes blinking into view, we know we’ll never be a whisper in the leaves, nor fletch a bird’s bright wing.
When we’re gone we’ll be a brief thought in the minds of those we leave, then nothing, as moments are nothing, and yet are everything.
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