THE SHAPLINESS OF FAMILIARITY

 

The plot is a storybook orphan

wild and insolent with the arrogance

of partheniums. Hemmed in, it resists

boundaries as if they were bullies.

When they come up at last, the walls

are punctuation marks misplaced in

an ill-constructed sentence.

Semi-finished. Messy.

Could the walls be missing some

friends too, like the ten-year-old

who comes to live among them?

This new geometry, its foreign

angles, is puzzling. The girl wishes

she possessed the whale's superpower.

Echolocation. Here power-cut nights

swallow echoes before they can fly.

A rhombus rescues the girl. She

knows this shape from math lessons

in school. Here in this clumsy

rectangle of a dwelling, a new gate,

black iron, collapsible, manifests

to keep pilfering trickery out. Her

grandfather pulls it every evening

and the iron folds enlarge into

rhombus holes. This too is homecoming.

This shapeliness of familiarity.

A dancer, his eyes orbs of fire, 

his limbs, flying talons, comes 

to live on a wall. The girl looks 

at him from her bed. He's still

and yet he moves, like her thoughts 

do even when she appears seemly. 

The dancer's glistening forehead,

his diamond sharp gaze, tells her

this is home. She believes him.

The plot is home.