Sparrow at Dawn
Sara Swoboda
Serenade the fallen sparrow.
But do not sing of the open sky.
There are limits to this world,
And I believe I am not written into it.
No,
I encompass it and I permeate it.
The partial me is filling the room.
A single drop on a windshield,
Does anyone notice the rain before it
pours ?
The pink flurry of gossamer-petaled
daughters
Their slippers' unsteady grace, clumsy
in growth.
Toe, flex, point. . .
Audience. . .
Applause.
She needs new shoes,
the old ones are worn and do not fit.
And tell her she can be everything,
but do not tell her she can be anything.
She should have boxes of shoes.
Strewn about the floor of the bedroom
beneath
Darling snatches of familiar faces, Europe
and
Ski towns tacked to whitewashed walls. Bouquets of perfume and detergent disperse through the awards and Ivy applications past the silver Crucifix from her Confirmation and out the shuttered window. The shelves lined with hard-backed Twain and
Steinbeck,
Glass dolls, charm bracelets, and ballerina
figurines.
In the closet hang backless dresses, and numbered jerseys and faded jeans And she is pulsing on the bed, and she does not afternoon alone. And the scent of euphoria and the explicit
smoke of it
. . .her laugh fills the room and she trembles
at the touch,
Naked in her newness, raw in her unraveling.
She is revealed. . .
(Unclothed) Curious. . .
Curtain.
Nine hundred mi les behind.
And when has become now, the letters home dwindle.
Famous halls where great feet walk.
Six hundred names, one room.
Roll call. . .honor list. . .they are all lists.
And she is paper, and she longs to be ink.
Out the window she sees the snowy fields and
the solitude.
She cannot stand to be this close to every... Crimson peers with crimson blood and the veins are
opened and dilating
And soon they will be no more, and the blood will
all be let out.
Spilled in pools or trails to corner offices and
suburban straits.
Out the window she sees the snowy fields of solitude. There is no blood on the snow, it is white. And she does not want to bleed, she wants to pulse.
Feel. . .
Walk. . .
Be. . .
Blowing grasses of slender green meet the edge of
the earth
The sky i s every where, she breathes and she fills it
More than it fills her, and she walks alone.
Everything fades into anything, the snow melted. Her veins beat and her feet are bare.
She does not know why the wind blows the way it does She does not want to know.
She boards a train and stops where she pleases.
Steps out into herself . . . does not bleed. And the sparrow is overhead.
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