Her face was illuminated by the slender citadels of light that leapt from the spaces in between the half-drawn blind.
She sat there, upon upholstered wicker
Her head, lain to rest upon her knee
The long, thin, streaks of translucent amber-salmon cut across the ridge of her cheek bone, wrapped around her neck,
and gently touched the edge her shoulder as they followed the contour of her cautious form.
Like sky-sent ripples, they splashed against her body as they ran down, curving around her back as if merely stripes on her blouse.
The skinny, slit-like sunbeams cast soft, broken up shadows on the wallpaper
They sang like the spaced apart notes of an open chord, chimey and echoed whilst holding fast to sustaining voice, lingering in the warm air for all to breathe in slowly
and exhale.
She exhaled.
A long, breathy sigh
And mused aimlessly at the world beyond the window,
Listing to the low hum of the white-bladed fan beside her
Dreaming about
Secrets
And the magic of everyday sunshine
And daydreaming
Far away flying from perched upon a puffin’s beak
Or gulls floating lazily on the warm seabreeze
Then swiftly sail down, with the tilt of a wing, gliding a on a soft convection current,
Tearing your secrets away from your fist clenched to your breast
And revisiting chaste visions of loving, and loveliness,
Spanish silver and the braded chains of keepsakes and small treasures.
The gulls cry
The
Galleons and schooners set wordlessly
Speaking to each other only in quiet gestures
As the agile sloops run headlong into the crisscrossing waves that dance between them
The puffin looks like a toucan-penguin
And the desert and the seashore are polar opposites
But the sand is the same.
The
Galleons have seen where the desert meets the coastline
And have sung songs about strange and exotic places from their canvass sails
The schooners listen, hoping that their journeys will someday take them,
The small and agile sloops will never go
They sail short range,
Swift passage, back and forth,
From Cape Cod down to the Chesapeake Bay
Hugging the coastline, staying close to suckle the warm mother’s milk of shallow waters
And think about the fragile definitions that give cause to separate the land, from the sea.
Never straying far from the maternal breast of the sandy beaches, treading only in cool green currents of the shallow familiar
They move quickly, and surely, unencumbered by the low draft of larger vessels
Unafraid of the transitory moments between dry land and the open seas
Sloops needn’t worry about running aground nor becoming derelict upon unseen sandbar or reef.
Only turning over if caught between the gaze of a tempest and the sea.
But for now it is calm.
And the ocean laps against the wet sand patiently, smoothing out its wind-made wrinkles,
Petting the coast with its frothy finger tips as if to say, “You are mine.”
“And soon you and I shall be one in the same.”
The sand allows it.
It know that though the ocean advances,
In time, again will it recede
Both with each new wave that breaks upon its soggy edge, and also, with the passing of time in the clockwork motion of the tide.
The memories left as imprints upon the sandy surface are ironed out by the loving act of the water,
Imprints of a golden-haired head as wrinkles on faded blue-jeans
Are smoothed out
Smelling of salt-air and clean linen and vanilla trailing off the sideways seams
Following the
Traditions of the sun
The white-bladed fan humming
And
Beside her she can hear it
And
Clean white blades spinning, breaking as the crests of waves
And
Shimmering like the sun.
