widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
his earth, here in the desert beneath the winter-night, is bitter. It is bitter and brittle with all the dead bodies in the sand-monster dens, the flower seeds dropped by the migrating birds that could not root and the grains of sand that whisper the stories of the bones like diamond tuning forks so faint and frail that only a unicorn can hear them. The song of the bitter earth, as it bellows and echoes like thunder in her heart, is deafening. If her heart had any notes of its own, or her liver any sorrow of its own, or her belly any hunger that foliage could quell, she would still only hear that song.
Like thunder.
She walks on her frail legs that are no less full of decay than the dunes. Her eyes look at the moon in the way the coyotes once did. The wind rustles through her mane, and whistles through her horn, as it did to the feathers of the hawks and the eagles who can only dream of flight now. The black shadow, stretching thin in the moonlight behind her, shifts across the sand as a winter elk's once did when he strayed from the heard.
The unicorn walks and she is all the pieces of dead caught in the ocean-deep sand.
Even the music, when she slips in through the shadows in the garden, does nothing to dull the thundering roar. It only settles below the death-knell like a lone flute in a sonnet of drums. The faintness of it, the frailness that makes her think of the dunes in the moonlight, makes her treasure it more. She follows it, as the coyotes followed the lone winter elk, with hunger gnawing at her belly.
But even when she lays her cheek against the marble, close enough that she can see the sweat gathering around the musician's eyes, it does not fill her.
Nothing does. Like the dead, and the thunder, and the dreams she is never full.
{ @any! "speaks" notes: <3
