About a Girl

The problem is her lips. They don't form smiles any more than waves decide of their own accord to lift themselves up off of the ocean's surface. And if lips are meant to be drowsy shutters then hers fail miserably; crinkling apologetically and they let everything, everything through! The problem is her skin. So pale, translucent; so tender: it scarcely seems up to the task of keeping her separate from the rest of the world. The skin of a silver birch in winter’s pale moonlight- and it lets everything, everything through! Waves, I know, are a dance of love made as the ocean coils and compacts: the unknowable fullness of its billowing depths backing tightly against the deep-packed sand and backing tightly against the rock-ribbed earth miles below and then, exploding outwards- self throwing self across space. O, please - take caution in this place! Don't mistake that which is invisible for being tiny, or cramped or crabbed into corners for it is immense and all around you. Don't name it, and in naming it relegate it to forgotten dusty corridors in your mind. It lives in dimensions you cannot see. It hurts to take it all in -- I know gut-sore, deep within, and I can barely stand it. The great humped yearning force of the ocean is a problem as it flows past me, cloaked like a solar wind. See! It stretches to reach, and finally, to touch the face of that gloaming, thirsty moon. Never doubt that it does. People, I know, are odd constructs of stardust- each one of us, nothing but beautiful particles fired in long-ago galaxies hurled out from innumerable dying stars. Countless spidery green lines written out on the vaulted void parchment of the universe arcing achingly across time and space to join, unexpectedly: this is here. this is now. O, the equation of me! the equation of you! Everything, everything flows past me! and her lips let it through and her skin lets it through and I may buckle and fall to my knees. She shines, and I think: she must have a history far greater than she knows. Remnants of an ancient once-proud star and tiny re-crossed travelers have been reunited in her against all odds joyfully resuming their half-remembered nuclear handshake that once powered an entire solar system. They are busting out streams of limpid photons the color of egg yolks and they flow from her like a rampaging waterfall in the Spring: past her lips and through her skin and out through her hopeful eyes until, at last, all that is left races, laughingly, through the raveled lengths of her brimming, brimming, golden hair.