If I ask about childhood which story will you pull from that enormous purse? Will you tell it in English, en espanol, or en francais? I'll understand, the way I know it is easier to invent and reinvent self, a husband waiting on each coast, checkbooks with different last names, and neither naming you theirs in the end. She laughs at my need for precision, shuffles her lies in a box. Such beautiful handwriting for each fiction. I can see tulips teased open under those fingertips-- not forced; stroked open, coaxed before their time and willing. Nothing is fixed, she says, it is all mutable, and you can't catch me no matter how much you read, just remember the beauty. And I do, wondering was it Rupert or Hugh, Henry or June you loved most, simultaneously and at what cost, or were you so borrowed French you reveled in each love and every loss equally? How did they know which coast or cliff to finally float your ashes over-- the fineness you became still blurring lines and defying definition, as your particles, like the truth you owned, bone-deep dispersed on wind and water, some on sand, penetrating all elements of your erasure, except light. I still don't get an answer, her penciled eyebrows fallen parentheses still circling tight the words she won't say.
My attempt at character interaction. can you guess who this is?
Susan Daniels Poetry 