It is one of those autumn afternoons of adolescent yore.
Effervescent, this slow sacrifice of light
to the verdurous harvest Gods. The sky,
come nighttime, will be oppressive in size.
Wind and trees, she says, the girl from
the expanding universe of memory. My eternal
provender. Wind and trees, married. And light.
Memory like perspective: the further its depth of
field, the smaller each object, the less significant.
But memory isn’t like that at all. Some things
loom massive, terrifying and disorienting in
their scale. Because I believe love’s music
has quieted in my heart, or at the least become
a minor concerto instead of a symphony,
I carry the image of a girl sitting on the
back of a school bus. Other, faceless children
are singing blithely, and cold currents of air
rush through in a baptism. Cracked windows and
the ritual singing of pop songs. But she is silent,
smiling the faint and erotic smile of wisdom, the smile
that filets and quarters you into pieces. Her
skin is the consistency of marble as it steals
the diffuse ether of the passing street lights,
her hair darker than the pure absence of light.
Sitting silent and legs crossed. Hair in pig tails.
There are certain things in this life, numinous
and ineffable things, that you simply know.
Beyond empiricism and beyond language.
And this is why you trust them. She is on the
fine edge before beauty completely consumes
her. Smiling a smile that whispers of the body-song
lyricism we hold, hoping to sustain our fragile lives.
The girl is a woman of eighteen, and she is all
naked silhouette in the sultry summer dawn.
Wind and trees, she tells me. Wind and trees,
and the marriage cannot last. The grace is
ephemeral, and it must be. The trees abscising
in sorrow, the mysterious wind bellowing up
from wherever it hides to caress my skeleton.
Wind and trees. Certain things in this life, and
they are very few, you simply know.