|
| |
du Maurier
The door opens,
but I am not the new Mrs. de Winter,
just an awkward shadow slipping into normalcy,
where words are thicker than hardcovers—
silence clinging like dust to the spines
of books with torn out pages.
I wander,
but do not answer.
The air is full of Maxim’s secrets,
dreadful weights of things unsaid—
longings for something that has
slipped through time.
A voice stirs,
a name floating,
half-heard through the
Manderley of my mind
of forgotten conversations—
mine, or someone else’s?
I can’t say.
Then, he moves—
pulling du Maurier from the shelf,
as if it was never meant to be out of reach.
I watch, but cannot touch.
In the end, I fumble on words
saying foolish things like “itty-bitty”
trying not to say too much—but
every time I speak self-idiocy mocks the
darkened expanses of my wild,
Cornwall brain.
“You’re not stupid,” he says,
as if the thought had been his all along,
and I am startled, not by the words,
but by the shipwreck of them—
the knowing.
2.22.25
Copyright ©
Laura Breidenthal
|
|