How quickly I move into whole mansions made of words. How slow to read the walls. When small, these rarely fed me, except in secret. I am small again, remember how they poured instead, great empty gushes when they came at all, how I could scarcely take them in. Then gulped and gulped, returning to the dappled light of trees, a woman humming.
It was my grandmother, pouring and glazing angels, while my mother complained over cellophane wrappers. How she had done it again, eaten too much of what could not feed her, promising again in cheap cellophane words to a plastic-wrapped god, to be good.
Grandma died and I could not ask her what she meant except in silence, in secret. These inflections, their whispered hush, I knew by the scent of them. Their touch.
Where shade vanished over time, I learned to provide. How did you learn? No voice is asking. Or, What changed?
The fabric of the canopy, this pull of skin. To shade some ground beneath it, for a landing. To crawl, as the child once did, beneath a plastic-coated tablecloth, to hide.
Above me, the makings of a feast, abandoned. Cut bread, knives. Cheese, reflecting vessels and remnants of a meal never offered. Glasses scattered by the hands of ghosts who tried to raise them. The cloth is stained.
I collect another word, as if to make a room of it: Zugunruhe, the restlessness of the migratory bird. Even in captivity, the body keeps its season. The bird hops and turns. The cage remains. What does the season ask now, of this body with nowhere to go?
Here is a painting in an empty room. Two clocks side by side. One moves. Over time, the other stays. One keeps time beside another body, drifting away.
Now a chair, a light, a room. Someone is coming, says the preparation. Someone outside it calls back, wait.
