She Calls Them Allegories of Innocence

 

She Calls Them Allegories of Innocence

 

Maybe it’s the shapes of things that go

blurry at first & in the blur, soft.  Even those

angular sharp edges are folding

so that at this distance they bear, being fuzzy,

some resemblance to a child’s nighttime

soul stuffed or woven & clutched in the dark,

in a dark so dark no lights were allowed in.

Something terrible happened

in that dark, something that repels

words themselves as though those words were plastic

bullets & too wheedling, too weak, too shallow

in the root, too new to penetrate or pierce.

The other day I was walking with my son who wants

to be my daughter & I was remarking

how marvelous the new grass, its perseverance

to move the weight of winter-compacted

dirt, coax it out of the way

(though who knows

what is happening in that dark, maybe it’s not

coaxing at all, but something more dire, more

sinister in its life-drive) pulse by pulse

every day & it simply has no choice but to

yield, to make way for this splitted seed

rising up and keeping root, look! how

surprising something as tender as a tongue

of grass shifting the heft of the bearing of the past

six months! First its curled, the beginning

of a fern.  A furry cochlea.  In the receding

winter, in the chuff & wind-

scatter of last autumns leaffall, the coming up

is somewhat shy, almost entirely camouflaged, her

way of making a today from a yesterday

hunched & humbled & fuzzed with an entire

ancestory in each frond & blade.