Mathilde In The Dirt

She is horse-hoof dust and cloth and the lazy rays of

sun will squat upon her unblinking eyes.

She moves sadly through the woods, hanging from the

back of a caravan, thread and nail have caught her

hand.

She relinquishes her grasp and tumbles to the earth, to

the wheel ruts, a tangled heap of calico.

She sobs dryly for the girl who whispered like a leaf

in the autumn-time, with winter skin and breath of

clover.

Now she's all alone, immobile in the dirt and she can't

change her face to greet the evening pressing, cold,

around her.

And in the dark she can see new faces; silver like the

dew-reflected moon... They laugh at her dress and sing

like wind in the winter-time, wildflower tongues and

moth-wing ears they sing:

"We have a doll from a human child! Hey, hey!

We found her floundered in the dirt! Hey, hey!

Her eyes are painted pools of water! Hey, hey!

Her skin is frost on the velvet skull of a fallen

deer!"

And in the dark she can lift her head! Silver arms and

hands help her dance and blink like a firefly!

Underneath a bursting moon, twenty years elapse and

soon the sun is up, and she is cloth: Mathilde in the

dirt...

She would gasp in disbelief and she would bend her face

with crimson smiles were it not for the daylight, were

she not a pile of stuffing!

She knots her brains remembering each leap beneath the

gnarled and starlit treetops, her flight through

hanging willow curtains...

She wonders at the people with the caterpillar fingers

and the cat-claws, the beetle wings and clothes of

lichen!

But now she hears a sound, a caravan approaches and she

shivers in the dust! Her girl has come to find her!

Now she's held aloft, a woman cries and dries her eyes

on lost Mathilde from decades past who wandered far and

wandered back!