story

I miss writing!

Still-Life

Cut-out construction paper shapes
triangles, crooked rectangles, chewed circles,
laid out on plastic placemats, the kind with dinosaurs and kitty cats.
If ever there was a still-life . . .
Sitting in his favorite branch of the fig tree, the boy wonders if there
might be something else he should be doing,
anything fig wood and vine could be giving him
but isn't. Velvet viscous green leaves shading his face
from sky so blue He wonders about blue. Wonders
why his brain sees blue, wonders about the prism in the atmosphere,
and wonders CAN I BE LIGHT? To be the answer to the riddle:
What can touch you, and yet never be held? The thought sticks,
sticks thought, sticking sticks. Touching gardens,
touching shingles, and in certain moments maybe the strap of a brassiere,
touching traffic, touching couples who are angry and couples who have children.
Beneath the shade of the fig tree, the boy wonders, cracked
light reaching into the tiny corners of his face. Then a warm wind drifts-
And the girl comes and sits in her father's empty study. She lays on the rug
underneath the window. Who knows what she's thinking-
she's chosen for the moment to be an action rather than a person. Sunlight pouring
in the window and onto her body, her moment, is all she is,
just a moment. Windows warming the cold house in the snow,
and if you were in the room with her you might not see her at all, if
only because of the light. Cracked wood winter shed
and a box of collected seashells leaning in the garage.
If ever there was a still life.