Weather, a pointillistic reverie, broad yard of feeling. I have lived this instant before. Floridian weather humidity enough to relax leather laces in a shoe as though the sea were here along this desert walk. I wear the grief of absent mutuality. Feeling ready but not ready to accept a different rest. The white space in a painting that heals as doing nothing heals. Sometimes I start to mourn the fragrant seaside morning with you as though my fiction were less precarious. Perched on a rock about to slide. Is this the way death abides? Merely a swatch of felt that starts to take hold? I return to the Cape at age fourteen, grieving the not-yet that would become my life. I watched affection between a cousin and the one she loved. There is no deciphering dream that windows its way into my child heart, the same aged yearning for some now to blossom a new perfume wielding a distant ode to decode.
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Sheila E Murphy
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