Anemone: After Jamila

The windflowers wave to the spring. My red haired beauty moves through the valley like a memory on the stalks.

I am with a gentle woman of the flowers now. No nymph, but a mortal moving in the hothouse.

She was born here and will die here. Her roots are firmly planted in this place: she was not traveling through for a season. She didn’t stay for two more because she loved it. And she didn’t stay one more because she loved me.

All in love is equal to that one year of her glances.

I milk my cows and think of the stray cat that ran with its last burst of strength to her, while the loving creature rubs against my leg. Its freeloader children and our dog that barks at the mailman each day, running straight across the yard.

Our house: the door to our house is always half open and the grain house is always full.

I think of her at sunset as I walk home: she ripped the weeds out of my field in the morning and sat by the river every afternoon.

Whenever I visited her, she would be reading in her room at the inn. The temperature was always hotter there, enough to sweat less in my nervousness than the eighty degree preference of the old cat she would leave to me with all the tears that prickled her eyes, sharper than that little cat’s claws as it stuck to my shirt.

Oh, how sweet the sound of her singing. And how adorable her face when she realized I had heard, that anyone had heard.

Because her songs were like a man’s songs:

folk tunes of working men:

Old songs sung as low as the sinking sun in different ages:

like the ones I was taught to play on the shakuhachi.

A siren on the rocks? Ha ha, no: a quarryman. Her voice was not gravelly, but jagged and her notes would frequently crack and break in the middling notes of a half-soprano.

Where was she from? Some city? I think the capital. Yes, that was it, the capital. I know it seems odd to forget, but I grow older as I tend the chickens.

I grow old when I see my mirror in the stream.

In winter, it seems to be the only thing in this world still alive, but the cold of the mist that gallops and jumps over the torrid, braiding waters bringing an emanating chilly aura, reminding me that winter has possessed even this pleasant site.

I grow older when I see the sprites in the forest. They love my eggplants and in the winter, like befriended crows, they give me small things like mugwort and crocus flowers.

“It is like summer love:

You walk at night and the fireflies bloom out of the darkness like life beginning again:

Like the beginning of a small universe that lives for one moment:

It is like to frogs singing their love songs to the melody of comfortable silence living in two lovers:

but that is God’s gift to you:

The memory of love that wilted and blooms again in the next season:

In your heart of someone new.”

Golden, wheaten hair:

when frizzled: like chaff:

the bar maiden:

her perfume: strong: like artificial flowers

her make-up: tainted earthenware

her voice, though: warble of painted birds, not unpleasant

dress: always short.

She was a beauty like summer: golden waves.

She intimidated my wife before we married and maybe now that is why my love feels unquiet, maybe why when I walk I prefer to brood on another woman rather than look forward to our home and my gentle flower:

She was quiet, shy, beautiful in a modest, unworldly way until the altar, and then, over the threshold of our love nest she changed:

Gossipy chirping over the chatter of the town flirt, like the untamed babbling river, so that it has cooled my feelings into a deeper, colder ennui.

Would it have been the same with that girl and her sea star name? Discontent deceives daydreams and though I know well it might as well be differently the same: a good woman and an age-old, unfufilled ambition that aches in my heart like the muscle I pulled in my back: a constant pain and one, unfortunately, more steadfast than my love.

I contemplate the crocuses in winter: I haven’t brought her any in a long while. Her face when she sees them beams brighter than the bloom and it is a balm to my heart. Her gentle nature comes out then, but I hate seeing how cautious she is to approach them, her sincere, gently smiling, over-gratitude as she takes them, fearful to shatter the rare gesture of softness between us reminds me:

how much I’ve ignored her to roam: to wait at the entrance to mountain passes: to wait for a flame of hair that will never come home.

I think she must be married now. Whom would she have become the wife of? A doctor? Another bohemian? Another photographer gone in and out with a flash of auburn hair? Married twice maybe?

Would her marriage be like mine? Cool and filled with it’s everyday, little neglects?

What is she reading now? I should have peeked over her shoulder more when she was reading Natsume Sōseki. Maybe then I would have understood her heart even a little more.

I lay down to sleep at night and next to the strings of moonlight that bleach themselves into my wife’s hair, so that she walks about with them even into the day: blanketing her fine brown, youth’s spring earth.

I think of that winter river growing stronger, a barrier of an icy air keeping me from approaching her comes on strongly in our fifteenth year.

Our son sees a woman on the beach with hair like an oncoming sunset storm. She says she lived here once many years ago.

A strange poison comes into us then: it seeps in like an adder, adding on to the bizarre grief of an unloving marriage.

I ask him about her with more interest than I’ve shown over anything in a long time at breakfast. Then I ask about her once more the evening of the next day. I ask again and again; only when it comes to mind, but it floats up with old love stoked and rekindled every few weeks or months.

The idea of the other woman having been the tomboyish woman with the cargo shorts and plaid button-ups angers my wife more than the blonde upset her. That she had been so wrong about it then and that she had known me so little makes her feel deeply cheated.

I had gazed at her rough weed-plucking hands: their dirt and the rosy hue of her blush, I loved:

and kissed her there:

in the field, I thought I would grow love, more tender than these poison vines.

I had looked at my wife’s rose plucked hands with that bewitched look of a man whose heart rested on memories:

possessed in the moment with the desire of another woman out of one’s reach:

I wanted her similarities to grow into my beloved’s face.

My breath had caught in my mouth with a quick intake of air: I could feel fingers crawl up my throat. I felt a hand reaching out of my mouth. I held her hand tight with a squeeze for but a moment and she was mine.

She was naive and easy to get in my grasp. Those guileless, brown eyes looked at me with that unreflected beauty, knowing her own and never thinking that a man could love a woman outside her dresses and long tresses.

A boredom I could bear for her beauty alone, a shine in the earth of her eyes I believed could never grow dull:

under which I could bury so many feelings of inadequacy:

I wasn’t good enough for her:

The shorthaired beauty:

I could never hold. A mind that wandered further than her feet, never so retiring and slothful as the clicking of heels on hardwood knocking in the brain:

never an alteration to her appearance, but somehow refreshing to my eyes every day.

I should have said yes to leaving with her then:

I would not feel so trapped now.