It was summer.
He braided daisy chains and called them flowers; she tangled words and
called them speech. I was the only one who knew
the truth; that the thin lines of cellulose that run beneath the tender skin of a leaf
are not so different from the veins of blood and sentiment
that pulse through syllables as they
smack against your teeth.

I was the weaver. To the art of his flower arranging,
I added in her words,
until it was no longer clear whose work was whose.
I taught her poetry,
and he taught me composition.
She taught
nothing in particular
--except how to laugh
at the arching of a word
or the stress of a phrase,
and we would stare at the ceiling and whistle
and cluck and hiss words up into the air,
giving them up as offerings to a deity
long since departed.

Things changed; he
turned to painting, the artist's true calling,
he declared,
as if flowers were below him,
and she turned to that literary snobbery
that defied my wordspinning.
I had no words of my own.

When we grew up, I knew
that we were drifting;
he wore daisies and acrylic smudges like blush and eyeshadow,
but the facepaint was cracking on his skin.
Her speech was formed of bitter sighs
that trickled past my hands
and lapped at the ears of others. Her words
had settled into a largo chorale;
I could not make them dance to my jigs.
I spread my palms and waited, my loom
open and empty, ready to weave whenever they returned.

One night, we lay
with heads on stomachs in the grass, crooning nonsense to the skies
before laughter crushed all noise,
and then we unfolded ourselves, stood, bowed to each other
before racing through the midnight trees,
scaring birds and neighbors and feeling magic lick
at our whooping heels. We leapt into other worlds,
strung together by pictures and lush tales, flying
on grinning wings.
We were, my mother told us, adults,
but we fell asleep on my roof before they could remember
that they were supposed to act with dignity.
It was never a problem for me;
I have failed at such things, always.

When she left, in the morning, I received
an arm wrapped against my shoulder and a clammy handshake.
To them I gave my prayers,
brightly plumed sparrows to haunt their steps
and chatter in their ears. I prayed
that they would not cage their own birds,
for few things are more tragic than self-clipped wings.

Once, he called, and I went,
only to meet with a man of
wild eyes and flapping lips and sweating hands;
after pleasantries, he looked at me,
through me, and went back to the canvas.
There he opened his skull and spilled it across the white,
a thousand blood stains
offered to his private god. I watched,
skin glued to the floor, but I was not a part of his grim beauty.
I was the girl of the daisy chains, the one
who understood his flowers,
but not his self. 'Beauty,' he had once told me,
'is found in chaos.'
This was not the sort of chaos that I knew.

How can you weave, when the threads refuse to be held?

The natural order of things declared, and eventually,
it was so:

He, with his paints arrayed on the table,
dabbed at fat smudges of garish carnival guts
and smashed them across the canvas,
while the brush splintered in his hands.

She, with her blackened teeth and the fetid smell of ink
rising from her mouth--she drafted under deadlines.
The crude world of journalism and sensation
overrode her poetry; the caps of her pens
were pockmarked with use. She would split
the brittle plastic body, grasping it
between two molars
and pressing
like a
vice,
until it shattered and left plastic shards snapping between her lips
and empty words scattering across the page,
dead or dying or never quite born.

As for me,
I sat in my room
with my head in my hands, my nails
scraping and scuffling at my dandruff
while I talked to my new friends,
the floor slats of my attic room, because my old ones
had nothing to give. Without my
loom, without my threads,
I, the weaver,
was an artisan
without an art.