Come, let’s figure this out. This drain on resources, this wound, weeping tiredness, weeping fatigue. Let’s look at ideas and prepare against the winter, the fall of life to dust and regeneration: an idea curls across the palm of your hand, as they always do; a soft fingertip draws a circle; like the breeze that started blowing when your new lungs cried into the blank space above your cot, a blank space once filled by the huge face of your mother, space that moved from blank to starry when you turned to the window – and how the space shimmered as the breath curled away to petition the seasons and find its place rustling through long grass, moaning in chimneys, rattling branches in forgotten forests. Once, when you were little, you watched a fox emerge from the hedgerow, stop to ponder you and sniff the air. You waited, tense, but the fox dismissed you and returned to the foliage to clamp its jaws into the scruff of its cub’s neck. It brought the young creature into the sunlight, though it immediately retreated into its mother’s tail, letting out a little cry as it settled amongst her thick auburn fur. You saw the grass ripple with a quiet breeze, then; a leaf twitched on a twig, and into the palm of your hand a circle curled: the beginning of a life passing into unknown quantities of danger and nurture, hunger and anxiety: the beginning of life passing through your fingertips, and into the unknown.
©James Bruce May, 2017
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