Girl, Woman

She is running down the lawn.

"I've got it!" she tells him. And she does.

Because the sky is blue in the afternoon, and the world is young.

She looks back, perhaps to look at us, at what we might have known, at what we could have told her (nothing), with her blue eyes and her young face; she is running.

"I got the scholarship!"

The celebration lasts for days; and longer in her heart, beating, weeks after the bunting comes down she trembles at the thought of university, a universe in her mind.

A parable is like a picture; it's in what you draw. The lines, the marks. The line of her is curved, like Earth, one whose mathematical description would require multiple-variable differential equations, relativistic and alive.

She bursts into the lecture hall and sees the screen; it is her mind, fizzling into light like champagne.

Has a young woman ever been more eager to learn?

But the turning of the bird in flight is so dangerous and this curve is hers; the awakening. Hitler told Germany to awake and what was the horror; because to wake up is the most dangerous thing you can do.

Young woman. Burnt like a lighthouse in your mind; fires from Ilium across the Aegean, pharotekton lighthouse-maker sister cousin child revolutionary:

Paint the sky for us, eh?

" … paradoxical … class relations … the turning gyre "

All true, all true, but where's the rue? Where is all the sadness at our state?

Young woman. Will I see your eye turn in like most, accepting of the crueler sights and ready to impose them?

Young woman, Go West! Go downwards towards delight, who was once delirium-- delight the mystery comes all at once, no better and no worse than that first joy, but further, and darker, in its streaming fury of the sent returned and stamped and earned the face of worry and of courage in the shaping of disaster on disaster--

Where now the revolution …

She is turning on her heel atop the grass to look at you; to look at me …

What does she know as she is curved out from the palm of Sandy Koufax for a home plate beyond our imagination? Does she know what she intends? Or does she only know the feeling in her bones, and the trembling in her skin, the will to win, and the shroud of grinning imps who represent the knowledge of the world?

Hold her tight, Sandy; this pitch is gonna be a royal bitch to hit

And if we can connect with her, of whatever gender and whatever color, of whatever age and whatever nation, youth the hurting word of truth that stems and turns and churns the whirring urge we know all all and all at once; it moves us through to move the trucks and crews we've set about our cities and our bowls of porridge: revolution, baby …

She's crying, with a look in her eyes I've never seen

Find more by Robin Wyatt Dunn in the Author Index.

Comment on this story in the Aphelion Forum

Return to Aphelion's Index page.