Forty-four of Fifty

In silence she patrols, a ghost guarding her salvaged thought,
the girl I recognize and would befriend again. Her story beckons
my ear, my hand.

She was in her youth an army of loneliness
with one tight pocket of love. Insomniac
she at last puzzled it
seam out
and then love overran the borders, ransacked the granary,
freed the officers from command. She had not learned to rule herself
and let the conquering forces have majority. Now, civilized,
she in her urban splendor welcomes all travelers, merchants,
educators, farmers, politicians, with the wide roads of polite introduction
and the leasable vacancy of agreement as though their conversation
and preening strut were the heart of this potluck frenzy.

In her adult visage, the mortgaged infrastructure and responsible media,
her own skin is a hive of noise, a circus.
She can't find it, she can't hear it, her
lonely joy.
She has overturned closets,
ripped pillows, and now she sneaks
through the streets calling softly. The vein of solitude once
threaded her, a river in flood to support empires in trade with far lands.
She lets herself live because she believes it is still there.

Now she has fallen silent,
waiting to be purified from
the musculature and nerve she must haul gratefully
as they keep chattering appropriate noises. Her eyes are a luggage
of readiness, of desperation. I have tried to meet her glance,
I've written a note—I will give it to her: Spare love the beheading.
But she does not look at me, her childhood friend,
or at anyone who knows the tale,
what she has done
and has become.


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