The Ghost Trio
by Linda
Bierds
Please Enjoy !~
The Winter: 1748
A little satin like wind at the door.
My
mother slips past in great side hoops,
arced like the ears of elephants
on her head a goat-white wig,
on her cheek a dollop of mole.
She has
entered the evening, and I
her room with its hazel light.
Where her
wig
had rested is a leather head,
a stand, perfect in its shadow but
carrying in fact, where the face should be,
a swath of door. It cups
in its skull-curved closure
clay hair stays, a pouch of wig talc
that snows at random and lends to the table
a neck-shaped ring.
When
I reach inside I am frosted,
my hand like a pond in winter, pale
fingers
below of leaves or carp.
I have studied a painting from
Holland,
where a
village adjourns to a frozen river.
Skaters and
sleighs, of course, but
ale tents, the musk of chestnuts,
someone thick
on a chair with a lap
robe.
I do not know what becomes of them
when
the flow revisits. Or why
they have moved from their warm hearthstones
to settle there—except that
one step
is a method of gliding,
the
self for those moments
weightless and preened as my leather companion.
And I do not know if the
fish there
have frozen, or wait in some
stasis
like flowers. Perhaps
they are stunned
by the strange
heaven—dotted with
boot soles and chair
legs
and are slumped on the
mud-rich bottom—
waiting through time for a
kind of shimmer,
an
image perhaps, something
known and familiar,
something
rushing above
in their own likeness,
silver and blade-thin at
the rim of the
world.
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