THE ROAD OPENS FOR YOU.
AS THE OLD WOOD BOUGHS, WITH THEIR GOUGED EYELETS AND GREAT, KNOTTED LIMBS, PART FOR HER AS WOULD REEDS FOR A SVELTE MINNOW SPECK, SHE FINDS HIM AS A SHADE CUT AND CAMOUFLAGED IN THE SOFT GREEN-GREY, STRIPED PINK IN DAYLIGHT AND CROWNED, AS DESCRIBED, WITH SUCH STRONG MEMORIES OF RAW WOUND AND BRUISE THAT IT WAS A WONDER HIS LIMBS WEREN'T SIMILARLY HEWN TO TORTURED SHAPE.
He is surrounded by the smalltalk of animals, a sparrow here, a fiery oriole arguing there by a flank, sun motes swirling around his head in that way that leaves behind the breath of him, (which is just rain odor, earth smell;) clean haziness scarred to the point of facelessness . . . surrounded soft by forest sounds, and pastel, leaf-filtered morning.
"I am," he says.
"So they did," he adds,
bemused,
letting a little round-cheeked bird wander up his head, to settle in the copse between his ears. He lifts a forelimb and points at the aster-flecked basins glittering below them, corrugated by thin lines of duckweed. "Even the pond scum has its uses," he says, "that's your first lesson of the day."
The words are sonorous, clipped, rich with barrel-aged politesse but none the old growth and moss decay befitting his age, sharp as rust as steel nails as hiding knives that prefer, desperate, to be sheathed-- a brutal, hard tenor squeezed and scored with glass shapes, and colored iron with experience, with long dead anguishes gone dry, shriveled up as summer plums, wet, pinkish, vulnerably soft at the seams. (And that was the sound of him, paternal without the memory of children.)
He waits for her to speak, already seeing the white, wine color her voice makes. It was the sound of sweetness and fluttering.
WIDE WITH POSSIBILITY, THE WORLD WAS, WITH ALL ITS LIE-WAITING HURTS, TRUSTLESS SHELTERS, ANGRY HOPES, INEXPERIENCED DESPAIRS, TIME AND LEARNING. WE HAD ALL THE HOURGLASSES IN THE WORLD TO TURN, WAITING, FOR THOSE MOMENTS YOU'D HAVE SOMEDAY, THE ONES THAT WOULD GROW YOU, AND WATER THE JUNGLES YOU'D ONE DAY BE.
DON'T SWEAT THE TAGGING! GLAD IT GOT RESOLVED!
DON'T SWEAT THE TAGGING! GLAD IT GOT RESOLVED!
OZ
@Noxia
