gwen

When I was a child, my eye was older than an oak.

From the highest chair, I saw string beans move from my brother’s plate into my mother’s mouth when my father looked away. I watched my sister spit her peas behind the sink. A dog moved from the woods toward the kitchen door. The house unfolding like a book.

I read my father’s secret history of anger, my mother’s dissertation on subterfuge, their parlor of doubt, the kitchen of their discontent.

This was my host country and I its virus.

I witnessed a world that couldn’t be explained. Rhymed and unrhymed, its alien talk floated above a blanket of  verse.

In time, I would adopt its pattern language. I would deliver its messages like a page. I would spy with my little eye. I would open and close like a camera.

In the stories of that planet, I would find no character resembling myself, so I would place myself outside them, in a poem.

When I was a child, I hated lace; I buried all the dolls.

I hid in the snow and thought about what it would mean: to disappear. A little ghost whispering help!, testing its alarms.

But when I was grown, I opened the box of broken dolls, and when it was dark, I held the tree by its branches and all the childish words rustled back into the woods, into the purple snow.

I knew there was a story larger than anything.

At the back of the lens, the end was already on fire.