fields of gold
My mind has many mansions. Fields and secret pathways through the woods. I have a terrific capacity to preserve pieces of the past while misplacing my house keys. And of all the things it keeps, it holds colours longes of all. Like the particular corn-gold of sunburnt August grass and the later afternoon.
We are little, Aleksander and I. Four years old, five at most. We are in the fields behind his apartment block where the grass and weeds are uncut, tall, almost as high as our waists. They seem startlingly beautiful.
There is an air of sadness, and finality, for my friend be moving away to Holland soon, even though I don't know that yet. I only know that there's something different, something ending, even when I have no concept of what an ending means. I only know that the light seems as golden and endless as the fields, and that it turns his hair the same shade of yellow as the grass. The fields are a sea that parts before us, a sea we wade in to seek and pluck bright red flowers.
Rows and rows of scattered poppies in bloom.
Our hands are clumsy and greedy.
We reach and hunger for the poppies as though they were a secret treasure that we found which might at any time vanish, run out.
They are maimed under our fingers, and there is a sadness in this too.
I want the flowers to perform acts of magic for me. To come alive in my palm and take off like butterflies.
I have the sense of the immensity of things then. That viewed from above, we are just another two moving specks of the wind-stirred fields, probably as small and easily lost as the flowers. And the light is so beautiful that I open my hands and my face to it. I want the sun to seep in to me through my skin and nose and mouth, to glow within me like a secret lamp. I would happily stay here, but Aleksander is already bored, moving away from me, wading deeper into the fields, carrying the sun's brightness in his hair like a torch, like a crown.
We are little, Aleksander and I. Four years old, five at most. We are in the fields behind his apartment block where the grass and weeds are uncut, tall, almost as high as our waists. They seem startlingly beautiful.
There is an air of sadness, and finality, for my friend be moving away to Holland soon, even though I don't know that yet. I only know that there's something different, something ending, even when I have no concept of what an ending means. I only know that the light seems as golden and endless as the fields, and that it turns his hair the same shade of yellow as the grass. The fields are a sea that parts before us, a sea we wade in to seek and pluck bright red flowers.
Rows and rows of scattered poppies in bloom.
Our hands are clumsy and greedy.
We reach and hunger for the poppies as though they were a secret treasure that we found which might at any time vanish, run out.
They are maimed under our fingers, and there is a sadness in this too.
I want the flowers to perform acts of magic for me. To come alive in my palm and take off like butterflies.
I have the sense of the immensity of things then. That viewed from above, we are just another two moving specks of the wind-stirred fields, probably as small and easily lost as the flowers. And the light is so beautiful that I open my hands and my face to it. I want the sun to seep in to me through my skin and nose and mouth, to glow within me like a secret lamp. I would happily stay here, but Aleksander is already bored, moving away from me, wading deeper into the fields, carrying the sun's brightness in his hair like a torch, like a crown.