Angelhair

In the redcoat she (who is I) was an angel, dark and bright. Mama chose the drama: pretty scarlet to subdue the white walk, a world dumb with snow, patentleather shoes to shine the path over ice. My father paid the way. His teeth salt inside the grin. I (who’s she) had a manner of leaping toward a light suddenly running into ecstasy or heat, exquisitely blind in the body racing inside it- self. A little fit of imagining. Thin arms, cropped wings, to hold the bristly branches of fir, and sing- ing, sisters and brothers itching, happy from angelhair fine as a strand of cat hair split six ways and brushed into the skin to itch and itch again. We were wild and giddy with gifts. It was then and always as all souls itch and spin in lit-red coats that float down this narrow vein, so we spin in O, to someone who loves us and suffers the world for each turn before a mirror, quiet as ice, we fall all through at last here in memory’s tiny Paradise.