Oni Buchanan

After I found out that you were a sheep, it was always afternoon, and I stood trembling at the pasture fence, my hands full of dandelion and the longer grasses. How could I call you to come near? We had no names and only this place, this sun, the hill and its limitless sky held together by your gentle outline as you leaned toward tufts of grass. How beautiful you were, so still, so close to moving. I gathered bouquets of clover, strung violets from the fence slats. Sometimes I whispered, but the words disappeared before I knew what they were or what they meant. Once I saw darkness. I remember my eyes were open and there was nothing, only black, and my heart aching as I felt for my face and I was still human. While I cried, stars came and traced sheep in the sky and the voice that knew never spoke. I fell asleep mistaking the scent of hay for your breath. To wake once from the sleep in which you are held, in which your name emanates without utterance from the being that cradles you—There is no other sleep. Now it is always afternoon. How can I call you when we have no names? I search for the clover and violets. There are always enough. My shadow is always the same length and shaped with arms and legs. Between us, the distance of field is green and exact; the sun gleams from its cloudless height—I know that there is enough time, that there is always enough. Please. Come to me, remember me: undo this world.

I approached the luminous stranger who came to me from darkness in a gown of lettuce leaves, in a velvet cloak of green that appeared at first another piece of dark, but pulled apart into the glow-sphere that danced in swaying steps, the lucent majesty that slipped toward me from the reigning silence black above my cage. Oh extravagant—and were my teeth too sharp to greet or sharp enough? I do not understand now what was meant to happen and what was a mistake—but know the bursting, the sickening snap of ecstasy wrenched back to the body and the green gown flung in crippled circles traced like diagrams of wasting moons above my head—or portals to another world, I thought, but as I thought, the shriek dissolved, the body crumpled from the air and landed on its side beneath the salt lick. All night I tended the wasted skin and careful, brought it water, alfalfa, made a bed of cedar chips and tried to gather molecules of breath that floated from the plant shelf. When I remembered morning, I began to cry, began to pray for night to stay until the green took shape again and if that shape were gone, I prayed for night to stay, to be held in the same forever-dark in which I first looked up and saw the gentle body, and saw the graceful swaying of the stranger coming as if for me—now I do not know—but then, as if for me, and all my loneliness gone.