Wild Halo
What does he see?
The unkempt, wildness of her;
she is ridiculous.
If you subtract the scarf, and the
sunglasses, the way she hides her eyes
behind the brim of her black hat…those heavy
black socks she wears—jeans, strapped in;
she fights constriction.
He’s half in love and wonders,
with what? Not her shadow
bit of carnival glass,
distorted, blue-black—
he sees, dark hair, dark eyes,
an anti-hourglass
wrapped in argyle sweaters and
ankle-high boots. She’s a cat
stalking lines of light, a
caricature, exaggerated features.
Well, he likes her just the same,
the way she licks her lips before she
says his name,
the way she walks with more grace
than he imagined—it’s her affliction, then,
those eyes undoing her fastenings.
The way he stares right
through the paper thin
rib to the muscle, beat-beating
he can see all the way
past the put on…past the sad,
past the brittle bend of her
leavings;
she’s fluttering,
bruising a whisper of wings
on the walls of cocoons, and
he peels them back and presses close.
So she takes diametric steps—
the opposite path—
and prays
it brings her
forward, toward
the resolution of
questions—the answers
he writes in circles,
the magnet oracle
born of
“if”
that ends with
“you” and
“me”
together.
What does he see?
She swears it’s
parody. Bloated distortions
in mirrors surrounding, this
circus that has them both
leaping fire walks and
hoops that lead them
round in concentric,
endless
beginnings and endings
and she’s met him
before, you know.
They are never together,
and never closer.
He swears, some day
there will be fresh air,
roses along the brick wall
of the house that has broken apart
so that he can put
it back together.
But she is not her.
No more than a picture,
frozen—a series of ones and zeros
collected and sent
over connections forged by
wires and lines and tears spent
on dreams that end
again and again—the same way,
she swears she can see the
cracks in her hands.
These are not hers, so
she cannot feel them.
She is no
thing. Man says:
everything should be
suffering, troubling;
(the waters)
are dark, suffocating and
sacrificing
happiness—is for
the after
parties, those stories
for other people, those
tales we tell in
retrospect, which leaves
an afterimage, burned
in, that thing he sees on the back
of his lids after midnight;
a tangle of sheets, he falls
into her wild jungle of
swelling and shrinking
that rogue wave, that gust swirling sands
in revolutions shifting
back, emerging,
weaving one and one into
his vision,
impermanent,
beauty—
her bleeding colors that slide
from white to gray in a
gradient that fades, or a rainbow
that lists to the lightest saturation until
it is blinding, and all he sees
is the halo that hides
her ordinary.