Kathryn Starbuck

When the sun and moon were in quadrature, when the garden had become a wilderness and the clock refused to strike When the old year died and the sand walked into the sea with the neap tide When you had been too long away and your old snowblue footprints clotted and hesitated in the clay When the worry of this undone song unsung so long so loud my head I went inside and under to let the flood run free

I do my best to keep pointlessness at bay. But here, wet above my knees, I let it fly. Here, hot and cold, fingers thick with thinking, I try to tie the fly and look for the net, loosening the philosophical knot of why I came here today, not yet knowing whether I’ll free or fry the rainbows and browns once they’re mine.

I never much liked forsythia, never liked yellow, but liked the sounds: for     syth       i       a for Kythera for sight for sky for Sylvia. Forsythia made an okay divider between our place and hers. Sylvia used to trod through it to see us too often so we let all of it grow massive and dense hoping she’d go blind in it then hop aboard a bumblebee who’d follow his lovely great queen as she flew to her dream isle of Kythera.

I was the lonely one in whom they swarmed in the millions. I was their creature and I was grateful. I could sleep when I wanted. I lived a divided existence in sleepdreams that lit up a silence as dreadful as that of the moon. I have an overly-precise recall of those solitary years before I opened the curtain and drew upon a universe of want that made me so strong I could crack spines of books with one hand.

Who is that creature and who does he want? Me, I trust. I do not attempt to call out his name for fear he will tread on me. What do you believe, he asks. That we all want to be alone, I reply, except when we do not; that the world was open to my sorrow and ate most of it; that today is a gift and I am ready to receive you.

At last I was convinced that giving in to their thinking represented a huge error in the evolution of my family affairs. Riven with a savage melancholy, not permitted out of the house without two minders—one armed with needle sedative, the other armed with arms—I armed myself with myself and threw off the vulgar superstition and reactionary domination that had up to then poisoned my mental library, imprisoning me, making me believe, with them, that I must have children when I knew that I must not, would not.    And I did not.