A Name Trimmed With Colored Ribbons

They are seated in the shadows husking corn, shelling peas. Houses
of wood set in the ground. I try to find the spot at which the pattern on the
floor repeats. Pink, and rosy, quartz. They wade in brackish water. The
leaves outside the window tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus
on them, making it impossible to look past them, and though holes were opened
through the foliage, they were as useless as portholes underwater looking into
a dark sea, which only reflects the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes
into benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a few of the
rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as the eyes overlooking the bay
from the bridge scattered over its bowls through a fading light and backed by
the protest of the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded in
tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different shape, but all otherwise
the same. I am urged out rummaging into the sunshine, and the depths increase
of blue above. A paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray
bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite directions, and their
scrambling amounted to nothing. This simply means that the imagination is
more restless than the body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without
comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for example, you say, “I
always prefer being by myself,” and, then, one afternoon, you want to telephone
a friend, maybe you feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into
the sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly frayed, all loose
ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous
egg, sitting in the vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day my
grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular pelargonium. With a name
like that there is a lot you can do. Children are not always inclined to choose such
paths. You can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter buttons.
In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for my nap, the light coming
through was of a dark yellow, nearly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and
it made me thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it seems
even more incomplete when we were there in person. Half the day in half the
room. The wool makes one itch and the scratching makes one warm. But herself
that she obeyed she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is an
apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of breathing fish and breathing
shells seems sad, a mystery, rapturous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this
different world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on her stomach
with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along the road she has cleared with her
fingers. I mean untroubled by the distortions. That was the fashion when she
was a young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by beaux. Once it
was circular and that shape can still be seen from the air. Protected by the dog.
Protected by foghorns, frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a
message of happiness by which we were called into the room, as if to receive a
birthday present given early, because it was too large to hide, or alive, a pony
perhaps, his mane trimmed with colored ribbons.