Friday 9 December 2011

THE GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST (in memory of Gene Stratton Porter)

I wait for the solemn neighbours of my imaginings to rouse
when I confess that I sometimes lock myself inside the old pick-up
on holiday-weekends, but they are used to cranky folk who shut themselves up.
Anyway, that is how I came to see my daughter in the bird-speckled rear-vision
mirror of my husband’s work-weary truck last Sunday.

The hue of her hair has no name for the speaking, let’s just say paddock-grass blue,
with all the tarnishes of marsh-grains gone past ripeness, gone to ergot.
I caught her reflection jigging like a lap-dolly in a long flounced skirt,
like some sweet Floridian hillbilly, and how my heart tapped its foot a reel
remembering the bowing of air against bare armpit skin,
loose fabric ballooning around shadows, twirling on an envelope of secret afternoon.
My tender feet bare, like hers, toes uncurling bracken fiddles, I would run,
like a Seminole, without touching the ground, and my hair would fly
quick as a blind granny’s shuttle.

I remember playing under a blue-green palmetto, in a hammock of swamp
in a way-off corner of the grove. That tarnished oblong of truck-mirror could even be
a window on that other backyard of stunted citrus trees where the oranges grew
paper-skinned and ropey, but you would suck them, anyway,
burning the smile around your mouth with lonesomeness.

Will she ever remember an afternoon as though looking down a narrowing tunnel,
a spy-glass filled with verdigris? or the hundreds of wooden pegs moldering on the line?
or the five black hens playing doggo? Will she remember squatting on the grass to pee?
her body not being a burden? but a purple butterfly? not something she owes
to someone silent somehow? And will the memory bide her through all the long afternoons
of weekends to come? when there are no neighbours at all, near or far;
and no cheerful fiddles whining their lonely wails?

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