Pinwheel

PINWHEEL / Michelle Boisseau It's like a life (I could say): one day's small ambitions blur into the next. Most of the edges wheel off in the gewgaw's turning. Until it stops. Only then can the children make out the parts from the whole, the pointed petals that their breath can't start. I'd say that and you'd be unimpressed. You already know my love for the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century. Those three nights and days running last fall, drifting through insomnia with the choices in our lives, I filled the hours with all the poems of George Herbert, those golden staircases winding and winding up. But when I finished, I pitied the dead man, his chapels mouldering under heaps of ivy and sunflowers. When I got into bed, you were waking, the sky just going to that backwards blue of the humid autumns here. We called ourselves sentries in recognition of harm's way. You pulled the damp sheets up to my chin: Sleep now. And I did, gradually. This is the cheapest pinwheel I've ever seen. The orange plastic clip of its nose clashes with the red-silver, blue-gold petals, sea-green handle— a child's love of detail for the sake of detail. It's by a kind of choice, called circumstance, that we're childless. So we let the ideas about parents and children blur a little. When I found this at the drugstore, crammed in a vase of spinning toys, I knew you'd let me give it to you. 266 · The Missouri Review ...