Читать книгу The Nine Senses - Melissa Kwasny - Страница 8

Leaf

Oak stem, rational, its routes laid out like Roman water lines, insect eggs in the pocket of each intersection. Enter the tapestry room where a fire is glowing. Who taught you how green proceeds out of the red? Your life is so different now, healed in a way. Is this the shape of your healing: out from a center stalk, ginkgo’s narrow pleats, pressed seams of oak, embossed of maple? They are stretched to their limits. All skin. Yet they breathe the same air you breathe, breath of the wealthy, which is cleaner than most, breath of the poor whom they occupy. Read the palms of the earth in child’s pose. You think all you need is to be thin, to be this close to your purpose. Torn with loss. Limp without root. How can you disavow anything’s inner life? If all you think about is when you will sleep, what you will read, no wonder the wind lifts without a word. Everything betrays you with its promise. So what is the answer? Oak leaf splayed like the wake of a ship. Your route: straight through the middle.