Some Cannot Praise the Wind

There are three of them, Cinderella siblings: shapely, deciduous, their leafy green darkness undulating in the specter wind, its silent snare drum emulating heartbeats in syncopated symmetry. "Take us, Take us, Don't stop!" say the sisters, moving as deliriously as a woman beneath her lover, while their stripped- down stepsister, one on one, spells out stillness in inelastic nudity. Wind shears through her, unconstricted by skeletal shapeliness. Nothing to arrange here by the coiffeur wind in the pared-down beauty of brittle lace- work, if lacework be brittle. One nest rests halfway up on a slender limb, a single stem supports its phantom occupants, imagined, their ravenous snapper beaks -- landlocked shark-lings, all minuscule jaws, learning to prey under their mother's bellies -- inhabiting a denuded nest, awaiting a spring of speckled eggs, cracking the silent thunder of shells, to free those of gaping mouths, who know nothing of being born, just that they hunger and someone comes they do not name as mother: She of the dependable providence. For now, there are no newborns, only a feather; feather, feather, whether or not, provenance unknown, caught in a branch far from origin like us, trapped in our casings of skin: softness pinioned in lacework of limb; ragged, if lacework be ragged. Here, where the sisters have been to the Salon, come back as frowsy as ever, but groomed somewhat, from a blow dry and a cut.