Subterranean

A Child Banishes the DarknessThe child presides over our lives like theBlinding presence of tall white pines. In theLow room she hovers; she is the dark un-tamed place, like a thicket in a neglect-ed wood where I fall to after each newloss, the unforgotten dream buried like a small toy under layers of frozenun-raked leaves. She is the hidden secret we don’t talk about because there is noth-ing left to say. So much snow on the roofsof tall buildings, along the cobbled streets,in the eaves, and on the narrow bridge andin the quiet palm of the newborn trees.Nothing left to fear. All the earth is calm.SubterraneanShe did not know when it would happenor how it would overtake heror whether she would allow herself.All I know is that she could not take it anymorelying day after day underneath the hollow tree, waiting,consumed by a kind of fire,wondering if there is a type of lovethat saves us or whether there was moreto the world than the familiar paradiseof her mother's complicated and vivid garden.She smelled nectar in the labored-overchrysanthemum and amaryllis,but could not taste it.I know if it were a flower it would have bloomedin the cumulus overheadvoid of volition and sin,translucent as the filmy underside of a leaf.If it were an animal she would have followed it,but it was amorphous as feeling, weightless as dust,turbulent as an entire undisclosed universeradiating from the inner core beneath the earthand, still, she longed for it.Restless, she wandered from the elmto the school-yard to smother an intensityshe could not squelch or simmer.The wind swooned. Cement cracked. Deep into the underbellylight traveled, no one in sight but his immense shadow,and then a figure appeared out of the imagined dreamand matched it. So powerful, not for who he wasbut for how her mind had magnified himlike a bug underneath cool glass,every antenna and tentacle aquiver.No sign of where she had beenor who she came from. Only knowledgethat it would never be re-createdexcept by this: putting words down on a pageand that she had forever compromisedthe joy of summer for a dismal, endless winter.And as the field of force gathered,raping every last silvery bough,tantalizing each limb,she forgot even the feel of herself.When it was over she felt moisture. Rain.