Amelia, I have been thinking of you.
As I walked down the main street, beneath the red roofs and white cirrus, I saw you wearing a brown leather blouson, tight blue denim jeans neatly tucked into tan leather flying boots and I said, “Amelia, I thought you had fallen out of the sky and were lost,” but you did not even look at me.
You just passed me by.
I have not stopped thinking of you.
The sky is blue today, unusually blue and cloudless. I lie on the slightly damp green grass and listen to the scraping of insect carapaces against the grit of the soil, closed eyes staring upward at the red light filtering through my eyelids. It hurts to open them. There is an aeroplane flying overhead, I can hear it and I know if I look I will hear you saying, “The heavens make such a bitter master, throwing down rejected lovers, wasted and crumpled.”
I whisper, “Amelia, why did you give up your freedom to hold hands with such a demanding spouse?”
You do not answer.
I cannot stop thinking of you.
One day I will sail the sea, turquoise above the shallows, dark blue and deep in mid-ocean. I know that I will find you there, fallen, the gulls' daughter. One day I will take my canoe and fly with the breaking surf over the coral like you once may have done. I might find a sole of a shoe in the fine white sand, delicate as the aerial mist of drifting water in the high cumulus that builds over these atolls and I will ask, “Amelia, will you continue to hide in this uncertain boundary between sea and sky, teasing both deed and desire?”
And I will never stop thinking of you.
No comments:
Post a Comment