As Time Darkens, The Body Becomes Shadowed.

I look behind me to forget my future for a while. A green lawn turns yellow after lunch. Eyes feel brilliant discovering the change. Next to trees, flowers are insignificant. But alone, each dandy is wild with appeal. Fingers pluck pink suckles ornamenting the bush. Her palm becomes heavy with afterlife – it is nature, not everything is meant to show a vigorous bloom.

She takes no notice, that it will only be her that grows from this experience. A bead is at the bottom of every stem. She studies it in light and pulling gently, draws honey. Her tongue is sweet, her desires tender, her pleasures tasteful. Simplicity is why she smiles.

But the youth are lucky because they don’t think of that. They don’t waste playtime concerned with cause.

In the backyard, she has no limitations and the unknown doesn’t exhaust her. A hammock leans, the palms wave. The afternoon appears to be yawning, but she’d rather not wait for dreams. Parents let their children go.

A fence doesn’t determine how far an eye sees. Columbus didn’t stay between the lines and he lived beyond his death. We learn from adventure. Our Muse is Courage, our life force Curiosity. Inhibition doesn’t define us or decide who we are becoming. In youth the imagination is free to wander and picture who or what lies beyond an arm and a leg’s reach. Facts don’t disturb us yet and we aren’t anxious for our reality to change or think it can, know it will.

We write our own chapters. We share our own lives. And sometimes, even she likes to sign a different name. But never encouraged by fear of who may read our words, who will see our mind. On paper, an unwrinkled hand doesn’t avoid the superficiality filtered through the everyday. Whether we live for our self then or creation is a product of age, we sound better not trying to impress. Genuinely, the child is proud of a merging ego – thinking she’s been promised a lifelong friend.

Dad is testing chlorine, as Mom watches from the kitchen cleaning lunch off dishes. I follow, while everyone has her in mind. Although it’s never been said, we all hope for the same: please let us remember these times.

Where there was water for him, there is earth for her. Feet walk godlike, careful not to crush a snail’s shell. Attached to bark, a butterfly’s wings are folded from sap. Her breath provides mobility. They both proceed, not crushed by death. She believes caution and compassion are all one needs to keep the living safe. Should I warn her now or let her continue exploring? In memory I will be insensible and her knees will bruise either way. At this time, it’s too late to save her. She has already happened.

Trailing behind, like a tail, her blanket is soiled by dirt. Each stain lends character. Shh, Mom is the only one that likes things to appear new. But even when she sees her daughter in need of a deep scrub, and says a child’s carelessness is a clever way to end up in timeout, Mom will still close her eyes a few years after hoping a stain’s trace will lead her back to a vivid memory. Lead her back to a time when everyone was a bit younger and children encouraged us to be brave, to be careless; when the child tried to teach those looking down to be free.

My fear is I don’t know myself as well as I’d like. That my fascination has been disturbed and my attention now is fixated on intangibilities—minor sensations that the poet is intent on exploding, expanding for the eyes of an audience that will never show. Hell the writer rarely is attracted to cinema because intelligence isn’t awarded and his difference is always translated without care for the screen. I fear my attention now is fixated on inexplicable compulsions to discern meaning in ideations that don’t literally matter. I fear I went to college as a writer and became a critic. I fear being labeled “dense” is really no different than dressing up in a costume no one understands. I fear my personal library is the best thing I have going for me, but with it and because of it I will only achieve solitude—a self-designed, a self-imposed think-tank. I fear I am female whose feelings can’t make you feel. I fear the translation: I am a female who has forgotten how to feel. But most of all, I fear the rate at which I forget a character’s fabric, the texture of experience, the pattern of life. I fear the dark where dreams can’t be seen. My assignment today was to write three childhood memories subjected to mystery. Sensations circling the unknown. I have never done these exercises and it’s best I do, but I can’t deny the difficulty. I thought backward and in mind could see nothing. I fear I am unmemorable, my experiences undistinguishable. A lemonade stand there, a goldfish here, a bunny in a bag, a tent and a father with a blistering body from sleeping in the sun. Otherwise, the lines you read are lies by imagination, times I haven’t seen or known in body. My mind is patchy, my feelings underdeveloped, my attachment severed. The past four years are speechless. I spent many hours traveling alone, narrating the disparity between exterior and interior vision. And what I came up with in mind is something I’m not confident I can tell you. But to me—and this is the critic or as the professors say, “poetic philosopher” speaking—the few mysteries I could discover from my past are exactly what made childhood so special. I lived. I didn’t question, not in the way that prevented me from acting in the present. Pulsating through my every piece is the nostalgia for youth—a memory of a Self I do adore—where I lived unconsciously, when I was fearless and unaware of time or theory, and when I didn’t judge that certain being as naïve.