paced,
strolled, strode, and mounted heights of fallen trunks and once-lobbed
stones becoming the music rather than creating it. When I 1st saw her she
stood, stepped, strolled, her back to me so
straight, so slender, long,
with a sinuous power it moved beneath
the garment that she wore. She had shed her
cloak, dropped that extraneous layer
for now for later
it would encompass her closing but
now unnecessary she
had dropped it as though letting it drop
and it lay in wonderful
curves and folds, amorous valleys and fragrant
summits redolent of her.
Her
essence I could not define for considerable
time.
The
garment she wore, belted subtly for in seeing
it, much like a braid of golden fabric, 1 did
not really see it or merely see it and it was
only the belt for the garment which Esme(e)
wore like a tunic as easily and rightfully
as the chosen troubadour long left the trenched
roadways of rogue patterers and vagabonds.
The opalescence covered her from her shoulders
which were brave and straight
and spare elegantly proportioned for the fall
of wool and the cusp of satin and
moved, they did, as
though they knew well the tendencies and tyrannies and
the grave tendernesses of all such fabrics
of all such times, and
many places.
1 shoulder
moved, so slight and stunning the angle it
performed upon the farther green it
caught my breath upon it and hung it there
forgotten by me as I watched.
Esme(e)
turned.
She
turned.
Only
partially toward me, revealing a portion of her face, and
line of cheek, the dark fall of roping hair in
a salient loop converging temple and time and
the straight pronouncement of her nose, passionate,
worthy, enviable. Fascinating.
I think
it was Esme(e)'s nose that sketched and beckoned
and promised her and
once seeing it, and her, 1 was resistless to
the self-challenge and the quest which was
she.
She
played, turned, and Carrie laughed.
moment, that vision and sound, the scents of
the meadow bordering and feathering the odors
of the coppice trees whose legacy of streams
and thrushes they held close, the
paleness and closeness, the distinctness and
the illimitableness, of that moment,
was my coming upon them.