Gina Franco

But inside her, there is always velvet, velvet with its give and yield, the kind you find at a pet store, a bin full of long ears and noses busy snuffing up nerves among the cedar chips and their eyes opening wide as if rabbits couldn't know what softness brings, as if they'd never know the smell of something long stored away now brought into light, and now too her mother with a camera pointing at her, red child on the lap of the Easter rabbit, softness of the body hiding inside the costume, eyes glinting from the wide holes in the mask, not a single sobbing breath of wind down the trail of mesquite and broom foot-printing the hills of some rancher's land. The bird dog lifts his ears to the sound of velvet, the girl listens to the drawn cries of a crow, her father walks with the silence of the shotgun, waiting for the pointer to find scent, the rabbit at the end of it blinking, its wide eyes shrinking from the scuffle of their feet like velvet settling, laid over lines, drying across the ceiling of an uncle's garage where they talk inside the smell of salted skin. At least three dollars for each good pelt he says, and they scream like children when, sleeves rolled over his forearms, he brings the club down on their heads, saving their feet for cheap key chains, for luck that softness doesn't seem to have inside of cages, chicken wire, tubes of water, and sometimes boys who try kicking the cage around to see what happens to velvet tumbling. And, in the after quiet, she bites the hands reaching toward her, so they stone her, they open her belly and pull some things out, open the pink albino eye and groan at the fluid inside. Then they bury the carcass without thinking first of washing their sticky hands in the sink before eating dinner, before setting the table, in the still softness of her beige room, she sits on the carpet picking at the velveteen of Bunny's stuffed neck, the rabbit's eyes dull with scratches, eyes left behind on her bed at night when she stands in the hall, hearing her father breathe in his room in the darkness, on the futon, kicking off the sheets. Awake from a fluid dream of a woman's eyes staring from behind a gag, her white skin settling in fat pools around her, naked, bald. And a man's voice said,this is your rabbit, so she woke to this dream inside her, with his teeth wrapped in her hair, and his hands inside her thighs where he fingered her coldly. But it has always been like this—wild, insidious, and commanding because she gives to it, fascinated by it and caught by it, as velvet only listens and is quiet.

It would never be possible for a stone, no more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation. — Martin Heidegger The dragonflies again; the last time seeing them skim the river close to forgotten — their singing, their shimmer — now remembered, becoming so much flame; as tongues over the heads of the chosen in the child’s picture book of Christ I learned by heart, descent and weight of after the fact, the gift the fork between hope and vanity, the river that eats itself  turned mirror broken into light; the corpse between the beloved’s good word and the beloved who having spoken was ever spoken into being, lies, unspeaking, and as with any heaviness that lowers then hovers, remains inconceivable; so the letter given in stone, perfection in fire; love; all love’s failures; the winged animal drops to the earth and is there buried in a hole where it digs in the grit like the blade we left in the riverbed, adrift and cry- shaped in the memory, both that dim and that loud; though no accosting why it seems that way, everything ghost of itself or everything made of mythic proportion, the walker sinking from the face of the waters, the dragon I become when I talk to myself, what a belief is, terrifying and relentless; I’ve never been able to tell the difference; the brute and the apparition in reflection speak at once — the rock and the rock’s light — so that now the insect thrums and it is surely a kind of tenderness, an ODing in secret, turning into while turning from the soul the animal raised and devoured in dream; imagine, the child’s wished-for surface gives and ripples up to mouth the perfect imprint, saying “aircraft” and there are aircraft, amen, the walker is surrounded by flight on all sides; the walker walks without wings; see, the recollection is flawless, turning wings of  jewels; the recollection is absolute, swallows whole; echoes; and the dragon feasts; and the dragon flies again;

As soon as possible, I will confront the wren’s doings, rinse the white streaks from the porch bricks drawing lizards from their shade, the immediate smell of water too much for all of us. But first is lunch. The remains we’ll scatter over the driveway away from the bricks. Wrens come, crusts from our dishes make drama. Then history. What is possible in memory is disingenuous. Limestone, impressed with the archaic smile of bone and reptilian wrists, wishbones and feathers, describes. It cups the transitional form, naturally selecting one’s best side. There was the time you forgot your legs no longer could recall how to stand—then rose up straight and sang You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me Probably I’ve been thinking of that since August. The indelible wrens grate like shovels outside—exhumed, one voice rises from wilderness, echoes, settles, rests —then another, and, between them, the keep of an unerring quiet.