this is where you were, slowly shifting into the dust, leaning into the horizontal waves of sand that pounded the boards day after day, an exterior slowly disintigrating. and then she came, and recognized something beneath that skin, something redeemable, something recoverable.
i remember the dust here, barefoot in the dust and the fear of rusty nails, but there was no fear of loneliness, because though flanked by siblings, in this memory i have no idea where the they are, and hear only the wind, not their voices, and see only this parched, eroding earth beneath these bare feet, not their faces.
it is all vague, like this photograph, perhaps precisely because that is what remained after all--time came like some gentle mother and removed those memories, those thorns, but here are these flaking images, heaped in piles, reeking of pain.
we have scattered like leaves, and only i will return again and again to this place, searching for something i buried long ago. i dream it is a cat, i have buried her half alive and forgotten her, but I can't stop searching this earth for the almost imperceptible mewing. no, it was something purloined from the TG&Y, a small toy buried so that no one would know. no, it was something far more valuable. see it there in the yard, a shoot eruptng from the dry soil, not a rusty nail, not a carcass, but a tree with stars shooting out of its boughs like fire.
she had seen it all, my mother had. she had that skill of seeing far into things, and she had seen the house fall down around us all. i have forgiven her for everything, and still i go on gouging the hardpan with my fingernails.
