Tune

Your hands play out a tune on me, a half- remembered ditty from when I was seven, young, scabby-kneed, bespectacled and unsure of myself. I am that wide-eyed child again, dreaming of bigger tomorrows, and hiding from reality between the words of my books. Even then, I knew I liked to write, my hesitant fingers always surer when holding a pencil to paper, the edges of what I wrote smudging with my sweat- pencils made for such impermanent dreams. My first story was about a boy, and my first poem? It was a tapestry of wishes bound together and set down on paper that I showed my father, trusting that his ‘grown-up’ intellect would hold my dreams better than my own small, callused palms. He marked it in red, and then gently set me, staggering and stumbling, on the path to poetry, to new words, new worlds. Your touch today is like his, almost gentle, guiding; I only miss that smell of soap he always carried with him, his own personal attendant cloud. I turn to you, and you mention a struggle that is as far as it is close, and when I fall apart, trembling with the violence of my thoughts, you hold me while I grow still. Your voice, soft as rushes, brings me back from blinding rage to cold logic, or at least an aspiration for it; you know well enough how very logical I am at the best of times. You correct me softly, and in your fathomless eyes,I see that you have seen the little girl, bewildered by the raging turmoil that surrounds her; you know that girl almost as well as I do. The clock ticks past two and the silence of the night is filled with the smell of the orange we share in the darkness, the juice from the torn quarters spilling onto my white sheets. I know that when I roll over in my sleep tomorrow, you will be there in my dreams, walking into them, carrying the smell of oranges with you.