Four

One of my resolutions in 2009 was to go back to writing, and that was one I fulfilled. This piece has been a year in the writing. Crys will be reviewing it and perhaps it'd make print too. Four, for each of the seasons.

spring

9 Jan 2009

The emperors married their daughters to foreign tribes for peace. Whose peace, I wonder.

Where's home, when that which I've become familiar with, is not my own.

I open my veins each time, pick the threads of healing scabs. I wonder if my blood will run dry before life will grow on this soil.

Planting spring in dust. The season of fecundity used to begin with virgins led out into fields. But the fragile are not the only ones who bleed. Grasp my pieces.

Unbidden, some seeds take root.

You, a bittersweet plant, such sharp leaves. Hungry, the child makes the mother bleed afresh. Is this what being alive means.

Lick.

Desire, sweet wild pale. Crushing unwilling blossoms into life.

Taste on my lips these violet trysts.

And kiss spring.



winter

23 Feb 2009

Twisting the flesh, I wonder idly at the absence of pain. I prick my finger as the queens of old did. Snow, blood.

Glass.
In the cold, tendrils of senses freeze. Mold creeps over the colours, slowly curling into grayness.
The edges of consciousness still its graphite blade.

The child dies, his cries lost in the low, keening wind. There is no smell.

Full circle.

Your death returns me, to me.

In the distance, a storm of snow approaches. I lie on the ground
naked as the flakes cover me.

white.

colours.

black.


In this cocoon of whiteness, I finally feel my heart, beat.

It is only in winter that I feel my warmth.

Sleep.

I close my eyes and fade to nothingness.


summer

25 March 2009

Sitting quiet on a reed, the naiad breathes the warm air. Sunlight opens a fissure on its head and the shell crumbles into flecks that sink into the belly of a fish. A dragonfly emerges and all through the pond, a thousand tiny summers begin.

Strange, foreign beauty. Inside, are you still the naiad or have you become the dragonfly.

But thought is neither real, nor is feeling anything but a flame of ephemerality mimicrying permanence. Summer comes in spite of, and you, like me, must bloom. Break. Cast off the old form.

The reeds whisper and the air shimmers with the scent of damask roses and imperceptible changes. Fragile wings write patterns of flight, and the new body glistens glass-red in the heat. Light on my finger.

My hair grows to my waist and the eyes become clear. Roses and vines coil and pomegranate-stained lips spill with laughter as many hands reach out, mutely grasping for life, as if one living could make up for many waiting. I see your gaze tracing my movements as I dance for you and know love as equal parts desire, hope and fear, if only, for the season.

But no reason is needed for blooming.

I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.

And no reason is needed for loving.

You are alive.

So live.


fall

20 Dec 2009

there is a lushness in decay, this over-blossoming of life.

I feared falling. feared this porcelain life would be riven by off-key notes if just once, I let go. yet consistency is not constancy, and the yellowing flesh burned for completion while buried among a thousand

prosaic

what-ifs.


Inside, I was the changeling child laughing about eggshell inconsequentialities, a moth-winged heart waiting for lightness, yet not daring the light.

And fall I did anyway, in a day much like today, fighting every breath of the way, the ordinariness of you a swallow of cold air to the gut. And in falling, learnt that grace was not always found in perfection.

In many ways, dying clarifies living.

From the remnants of the year, a new self looks out - lighter, more real, more constant than before. The flesh is softer now, curves of thought and feeling in confluence where before, there was only the harshness of a will that never knew how to let go.

in my bones, I carry the imprints of the you who touched me then.

the air is heavy with ghosts of love past, phantom children who cry for stillborn hopes. and this I finally understand: I loved you then, as I do now, more than you'd ever know.

it leaves me the present, to make peace with choices and fragile consequences. And I grasp with both hands now, what the unconscious mind sensed in cutting us apart: growth is but internal change made visible, and deconstructing the girl I was, gives wing to the seasons to come. the cages finally break - these bonds do not bind.

I do not know the woman I'd become, nor the man you'd be.

Perhaps fall is a finding of grace, perhaps fall is a return to flight. like kites without string, perhaps it'd lead us home one day. perhaps perhaps does not matter:

That which is broken is beautiful too. And always, there is life.

The smell of wood smoke and burning leaves fill the air, and the phantom children cry no longer.