And Thus Collected
He brings me gifts: amazing tropical butterflies encased
in glass, molted plumage from rare, southern birds.
And Father thinks him quite brilliant and fearless when,
over cognac and cigars, he speaks of his jungle sojourns.
No one can understand, not my mother with her careful, cultured
hands resting in her lap, nor my younger sister who sits
at his knee as if she might become his Magdalene
and find some use for her long unruly locks, but
I find him flawed. Flawed like the mica sample
he brought me the first time he came, the one that flaked
so easily to nothing in my palm when he left again.
What streak of cruelty runs, I wonder, through a man who brings
presents of paper-light mirrors and talismans of the means
to fly to a girl who shuns her thin-limbed reflection, who
will never run again? From my wheeled chair at the window
I watch him walk our tame garden lanes below, able
to charm my nieces with drawings from his notebooks
of the more exotic blooms he's seen, plucked and pressed.
For what am I, if not the northern flower he hopes
to cultivate, dethorned but not disinherited, her father's eldest
darling? Why can they not see that he brings us all his talk
of travel, his gifts of silver feathers, rocks and tongue,
for it is I, a girl with useless legs he means to ride,
when he flies south again.
This poem first appeared in Moveo Angelus, Volume One, Issue One
