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The wind wakes me up
with a touch and a kiss, and always when I wake up, there is
the scent of blossoms all around and the sun feels warm. I
sink from the apple tree to the ground, feel the wet of the
grass on my feet, and the wind wraps around me, gentle
across my cheeks and behind my knees. He passes through the
blossoms and the leaves, and they tremble with delight.
I spend most of my time
in the apple tree, listening and watching. I learned to sing
from the birds, at first, but then from the girls who came
walking by the river. Their songs caught me even though I
sat so high up in the branches, too high for them to reach
with hands. Their songs had words for strange unknown
things like winter and lover and faithless.
Winter I never knew and
never will, but lover I think I know, and I think it's the
wind--a much more tender lover than the ones they sing of.
If he touches not me alone but the leaves and the grass and
the birds, is this faithless? It can't be, no. The wind is
not the wind if he's not moving among all things. But with
human lovers it's different. I know this from listening to
their songs.
Sometimes I've heard
people crying. Once there were five children: the bigger
ones jumped from stone to stone across the river and ran on;
the little one stood on my side and cried and cried. Then
one of the others returned and came carefully halfway back
across and held out a hand, and the little one stepped to
one rock, then to the next, slowly, still sniffing back
tears--and then was on the other side, and they ran away.
Another time a girl came
and sat by the river and wept and wept. I don't know why.
The wind kissed her cheek, but she didn't notice. At last
she rubbed her eyes with her palms, got up, and walked
slowly back the way she came.
Once or twice I've tried
to speak with them, but if they see me--and they don't
always see me--they run away. This gives me a funny feeling
right here, in my center, but then I think on the wind and
lean back in my apple tree, and soon that feeling melts
away.
But today, today I had
to come down from my tree, had to make him see me, because
he stood by the river with tears in his eyes and dropped
flowers into it and sang a song that made me ache in my
center like never before. It had words like drown and lost
and never return. I know drown; I know it from other
songs--but my river? My river is too shallow for drowning
in.
I said this to him; I
came down and said this to him, and he didn't run away at
all but said a May spirit wouldn't know what the river was
like in March, swollen with snow melt and rain, how small
child can be carried away so easily, and even a mother who
runs in to rescue it can be lost. Oh that pain in my
center--why did I venture to speak with him? I wish I never
had. Because he spoke, and I could see it all--see it as the
apple saw it, silent witness while I slept. The pain was
not the apple's, though, the pain was my own, or maybe his.
He won't be consoled by the wind, no, for the first time I
see how the wind is a thin thing.
So I made myself as
solid and real as he was and wrapped my arms right round him
and kissed his cheeks as gently as the wind kisses mine--and
oh! When you hold a man in your arms, the heat! Like the
sunshine, but I never dreamed to hold sunshine in my arms.
He kissed me back, and these kisses were so very different
from the wind's; the wind's make me sigh with contentment
but these made me lose my breath--isn't that drowning? But
then he pulled away and smiled a smile that isn't a smile at
all, a smile that's more like tears, and said it would take
more than the kisses of May to mend his heart. He walked
away, so slowly, but I couldn't follow him, I was falling
all to pieces and scattering like petals, and I tell myself,
when I awake again, I'll keep my eyes on the blossoms and my
ears on the birds, and my heart for the wind and never think
on humans and their sorrows. |
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