Between the Lines

“That’s not how it looks to me,”
she said, flinging a plate,
imaginary,
across the room.
It smashed into the wall
and split into a thousand fragments –
one was ice and plunged into his eye
yet lo, it melted just in time.
“But that is how it is,”
he said, wiping his eye
(imaginary tear)
that trickled down his cheek
onto his lips, his licking tongue
flickering in and out, a thousand forks with
newts and blindworms coming near.

Her heart is bloody, full, succulent to asps,
brimming with visions
(imaginary) of what her brain, busy, crowded, verbiage–ridden,
supplies. Each organ feeds the other.
And so, another plate,
whirling, hurling from hand to cabinet
where sets of Wedgwood, Spode and Rosenthal
in tribes of twelve sit snugly
declaring marriage, Friday nights and festivals,
children, (chipped off the old block), in dinner, salad, Limoges bowls for fruit,
tall coffee jugs, flowery teapots.
All smash to smithereens.
But just before they smash, an arm emerges from her raging sea,
dropping its sword and deftly catching
saucers that fly, plates that destroy,
cups that cut, soup bowls that spin,
teapots that tumble.
“That’s not how it is,” insisting.
And so the story spills in different ways:
half full, half empty,
white with murky indigo,
indigo with white,
half in, half out of shadows,
while in the silent stillness of the conversation
the sitting sets of plates in twelves
know
they will rarely be washed clean again.

LRH
8.25.06