I am the only vestige of what was once mysterious. I am the last scrap that isn’t encapsulated in the plastic of the man-made. Listen to me for I am wise. I am the window with the curtain pulled back. I am what you want to be in your most authentic. You want answers but I can only give you questions. You want chapters with bold headings but I can only give you keyholes through which you can glimpse something smoky, little scratchings as I dig down through the crust of snow looking for something edible.
I will always be dark and upredictable, my footprints difficult to track. I will gnaw at the blackened edges of your sleep. My howling will startle you awake and you won’t sleep as deeply. You will hear scratching and feel flakes soft as ash brush past and imagine it is my voice.
Sometimes the grief around me is green. I hear it in the pine branches, high up as it descends down into the center of my well-kept heart. I feel it kneading the part of me that doesn’t heal, the part where things were ripped out with nothing to replace them, places that should be plush, green velvet are brittle and full of pits where the seeds should be.
Green, the color of patina on copper, of leaves with blood memory of summer beginning their slow descent into winter. But not the green of that uniform I wore when no one reached out to me over that dark place, that wishing well with no bucket to lower. I did not like that color.
So this is the manifestation of my desire, so primary, so inextinguishable? These are the colors I paint with: copper, aquamarine, the red of sunset. Can I change the colors by wishing them to be different? Can my irrational desire be rewritten in a different key? I try to mow and bale my history and store it up for winter, a winter whose chill I feel prematurely.
I rip the stitches and begin again. The imprints of the stitches fall loosely around my feet. It feels like the eve of the longest day, the one that divides the light into the yin-yang of longing, the sides of an isosceles triangle. What does it add up to, I wonder, this middle distance, this labyrinth with its dark center and the path out among the branches?
Sometimes I am rowing across an orange ocean. My oars cut ripples in the shapes of hearts. On the shore, Fred and Ginger dance hieroglyphs as a stranger in a brown coat plays a cello the color of chestnuts. I disembark by a forest where a lady with a unicorn gives me the key to a spaceship. It’s not unusual, she tells me, to fall upwards to the moon.
The forest is icy blue where Fred and Ginger dance among the branches that dip and pirouette. Three horses nicker and shake their graceful manes in moonlight the color of diamonds. A woman lounging on a green suede couch gets up and leads me to the boat. Move over, she says, and we’ll take the oars together. Fred and Ginger, the lady with the cello and the lady with the unicorn get in the boat and we row far out into saffron-colored waves.
Play your moonlight music in the subway or in daylight, they tell me. Let your ripples be magnificent horses masquerading as unicorns or vice versa. The chili-pepper hull will hold, they whisper. Om, the tone of meditation that sparks the heart to motion, wind filling the sails of the throat.