Disparues, and: Rouge

118 The missing among us, the vanished girls, speak as speak damp shadows under stones, cool and mossy and still, a silence like God’s. A key, a small key, forbidden to use, keeps the chill of blood in the cellar, a stain that won’t rub off with sand or pumice or the frenzy of hands to hide what the body knows: heavy hang the apples engorged on broken boughs. I called to my sister, let your vision be our prayer, let horses trample earth hot with speed to cancel this fever gonging soundless in our temples. Yet all she could say from her vantage is there’s dust in the sun and green in the ignorant grass—my throat beneath the knife. I would tell her I’ve learned a silken tapestry , a golden goblet, the perfect mirrors are murder. Show me a woman who doesn’t seek death and I’ll close a door that never opened. Show me a man whose beard isn’t blue—I can’t even point at the sky— DISPARUES GILLIAN CUMMINGS 119 What color would God clothe me but red? A crimson cap to keep my head from rain, a carnelian cape to wrap my body in swishy silks of blood-spurt, girl-heat. Who taught me the trail through forest, where to find wood violets limp upon slender stems, how to twine them in wreaths gentler than these hands’ caress? It’s true: I wanted a warm place, a sight familiar as the bone-home of moon’s bed in a cloud-slumbered sky. Truer, still: a stone sang in my stomach—to eat and be eaten. A bite of cherry tart. What animal would God liken me unto, but a wayward sheep, wandering the way of the wolf’s spittled growl. And if I found death small as a moss-grown flower, and if the color of my corpse was red as that of my clothes, I would still whisper back to the voice that clambered over me, thick with heat, fur and teeth, this is the way of all loneliness —for only luck comes easy as night birds, to scavenge the unburied heart— GILLIAN CUMMINGS ROUGE ...