Beheld

She blanks me
all the time now – a new habit
of ignoring me completely.

Holding her frame ballerina taut
she pretends she’s all languid nonchalance.
Like chocolate trying to melt in ice water.
I alone catch the twitch beneath the left eyelid
and the way she jumps ten feet if anyone touches her.
Pupils dilated against the headlamp of human scrutiny,
moist beads of sudden sweat behind her ears.
I will her to exhale.

Sensing my proximity she’d quicken her pace:
Darting, ducking, dodging,
changing lanes against the traffic of thoughts
and playing chicken with the near collision of our minds.
Or I’d find her skulking
in darkened doorways of deliberate forgetfulness.
Recalcitrant. Impossible.
Sometimes she’d just talk faster,
fills her mouth with four syllable words
to deflect our confrontation.
I have to run to catch up.

She would disappear for days on end.
Wherever I walked I would look for her face in the crowd.
I sent her endless postcards from the edge of time
each saying the same “Wish you were here.”
Each left unread in her burgeoning mailbox.

As I was near to giving her up for lost
I suddenly found her
pacing my porch on a stormy afternoon.
She pounded the door once, hard, with her smallish fists:
Arrested agony and petrified rage
stopped her from crying out even then.
I pressed my face against the great divide
of oak and unforgiveness, held my breath, and waited.

But it is only in her sleep that she wakens to the landscape of her heart.
Wandering the labyrinth of uneasy dreams
she hunts for me.
Once I heard her call my name
and I hovered in hope
of being gathered back into her sweetpea embrace.
But her eyes are veiled for her tears
and I remain unclaimed.

When dawn comes she rises
to don a fresh, bitter cloak against the new morn of insults.
As she launches herself into yet another day of counterfeit animation,
I gathered the three stray strands from her hairbrush:
sixty-six thousand three hundred twenty one, twenty two and twenty three;
wrapped them tenderly in jasmine scented tissue paper,
so I could place them beneath my pillow tonight.