Hyssop

You say you found me in the river.

Did my silence call you?

Infants have such a way with women.

I recall gray shadows resting on gray water,

bulrushes flanking the riverbanks, cicadas

speaking unseen, rubbing jagged legs between

jagged blades of grass.

I recall more than you.

Not more than you recall but more than you,

yourself.

I can taste the clover when I close my eyes.

The way the man’s flesh finally split, like an overripe

fruit, how oil on leather shines differently than oil

on my sister’s hair.

Once I coaxed a cat onto a flat raft and

pushed it down the river.

I watched until I couldn’t hear it any longer.

Your father has told me that love is a bureaucracy.

I don’t believe him

but he is a beautiful man.

You cared for me when I hit my head on the stone buried

in the mud alongside the game trail, and the rain

made us all sick.

You said pneumonia or tuberculosis took the servants. I asked

which, and you said that it did not matter.

I slept for two weeks and had visions of a vast desert, a red

wasteland cracked by ancient upwellings, water’s footprints

fossilized to taunt the dying wanderer.

That I might walk across this river

I pray, that I might pull the waters back

like muddy curtains, or even walk upon

its surface, I pray.

I know you won’t understand these things. The shadows. The cat.

The distant mewling. I know that I should thank you, but I’m not sure

how.

Royalty is a trick of the light. The people fear me, though

even after all these years

I am terrified to look upstream.