Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Blindspots

Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see,

but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye?

--Virginia Woolf

And if it could be made visible to the eye, would it take the shape of the frogs crushed under the family's van wheel that summer you were fifteen and there were so many frogs that you were sure they had fallen from the sky; would it be lush and rounded--cumulus-like--or would it be the wispy smoke that hung around your husband's head in those first years you knew him? Looking more closely, what would you see? The faint profile of your neverborn child, the discarded peel of mango, a flash of light from an ambulance, a broken beer bottle in the cul-de-sac? And if you did see it, would you know? And if you knew, would you do anything different? Would you leave the mango--whole and untouched--in the wooden fruit bowl? Would you not run barefoot in the cul-de-sac underneath that slippery star-filled sky? Would you wish the frogs hadn't invaded town that summer? And if you did, how would you remember that summer now? Would you?

3 comments:

little miss mel said...

lovely...:X

Zoe Ryder White said...

So lovely! I remember a summer like that. I wonder if it was the same one...

Nicole Callihan said...

Thanks ladies! And Zo, maybe it was the same summer. Surely.