Mum’s The Word

Mum – School Song Misfortune

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***

I live amongst webs. They breathe casting shadows, shadows. I tiptoe through brush. One. Two. Twenty-three years on pointe. My ankles embrace the inevitable, assume the position, curl backwards into balls of tightly-wound dust dense as Pluto.

Twenty-eight years will it take to turn ankles to suns but, oh, there will be brilliance, yes; there will be light. Two beacons beaming above shattered toes, withered cartilage, elasticity gone awry, balance forsaken; at night they’ll guide me home. The oaks will look alive and brave to whisper, and we will sway bathed in ankle-light, bathed in smile and gossamer and rustling laughter, making small talk, making shadow-puppets with the webs that sheltered us these past, odd 50-something.

But the rains they come to make the forest sing. They fall as mallets. They fall upon all: the old, the young, the thickened strong — even the hollows of the dead, their bellies bloated with wind, birthed as pines, dying as panpipes.

The webs will fade and I will fade until nothing is left but stench and two embers buried beneath decades of decay. And, at the end of it all, mist.

A lingering, an insufferable lingering.

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