Still Life

by C.K. Williams

All we do -- how old are we? I must be twelve, she a little older; 
     thirteen, fourteen -- is hold hands 
and wander out behind a barn, past a rusty hay-rake, a half-collapsed 
     old Model T, 
then down across a barbed-wire gated pasture -- early emerald rye-
     grass, sumac in the dip -- 
to where a brook, high with run-off from a morning storm broad-
    ened and spilled over -- 
turgid, muddy viscous, snagged here and there with shattered branches 
    --in a bottom meadow.

I don't know then that the place, a mile from anywhere, and day, 
   brilliant, sultry, balmy, 
are intensifying everything I feel, but I know now that what made 
   simply touching her 
almost a consummation was as much the light, the sullen surge of 
   water through the grass, 
the coils of scent, half hers -- the unfamiliar perspiration, talc, some-
   thing else I'll never place -- 
and half the air's: mown hay somewhere, crushed clover underfoot, 
   the brook, the breeze.

I breathe it still, that breeze, and, not knowing how I know for cer-
tain that it's that,
although it is, I know, exactly that, I drag it in and drive it -- rich, 
   delicious,
as biting as wet tin -- down, my mind casting up flickers to fit it -- 
   another field a hollow --
and now her face, even it, frail and fine, comes momentarily 
   to focus and her hand,
intricate and slim, the surprising firmness of her clasp, how judiciously 
   it meshes mine.

All we do -- how long does it last? an hour or two, not even one whole 
   afternoon:
I'll never see her after that, and strangely (strange even now), not 
   mind as though,
in that afternoon the revelations weren't only of the promises of 
   flesh, but of resignation --
all we do is trail along beside the stream until it narrows, find the one-
   log bridge
and cross into the forest on the other side: silent footfalls, hills, a 
   crest, a lip.

I don't know then how much someday -- today -- I'll need it all, how 
   much want to hold it,
and not knowing why, not knowing still how time can tempt us so 
   emphatically and yet elude us,
not have it, not the way I would, not the way I'll want to have that 
   day, that light,
the motes that would have risen from the stack of straw we leaned 
   on for a moment,
the tempered warmth of air which so precisely seemed the coefficient 
   of my fearful ardor,

not, after all, even the objective place, those shifting paths I can't 
   really follow now
but only can compile from how many other ambles into other woods,
   other stoppings in a glade --
(for a while we were lost, and frightened; night was just beyond 
   the hills; we circled back) --
even, too, her gaze, so darkly penetrating, then lifting idly past, is so 
   much imagination,
a portion of that figured veil we cast against oblivion, then try, with 
   little hope, to tear away.