To Grandgirl Going Out Into the World

 

I wonder if you know this brilliant thing you did. I guess so. You always have reasons. Over on the wall, I mean—your sewn petals, and behind, the bold duns and greens, rose peach, that spotty purple, on up into cobalt firmament.

Blues like that? For real? Here the sky beyond my drawn-up legs, past the glass, shows only palest white, unglorious. And down below, my own coneflowers, Echinacea, spreading now in patches, bloom more a pink, not that beet shade. I think you made yours off on purpose.

(My legs drawn up, I said. Drawn. I wasn’t even thinking. Not penciled painted. Just pulled up, bent, the way I’m wont to sit.) 

My outside flowers, were I to pull some? Take them to that hijab girl, remember, who brought me jewels? Hard as she is on learning, I would press on her the wording, make her twist her tongue enough behind her thin bright line of lipstick. Echinacea purpurea. Eh ki NAY sha. Say the same s-h as in sugar, shuger, in special, speshul, in mission, mishun. Is this even English? For sure, not Dari. I would give her ones unfurled, wide opened.

Or were the other full-robed foreign girl, here at my knee, to come down off the cloth, what then? Were she to cast her eyes wallward, and point, and move nose close to peer, I would maybe push the same. Eh ki NAY sha, hear? See? Long drawn-out slow. (Drawn out, my word.) But the old-traditions bygone ladies, I think they spoke high pitched and hid their teeth. They kept their teeth behind their hands and stayed tight lipped like buds, their mouths and tongues unsplayed. So she might only titter. She mightn’t risk a try.

The moderns, though, my no. Nor you. Not you ever.

Say art imitates life. Maybe. Sometimes. I’ll find no needled stitches up my fresh-air flowers, anyhow. How’d you do that, Grandgirl? Go threading up your paper, through your pinkpink vivid blossoms? Thought you they’d stay put then, sewed fast? Not waft lightly toward the ether, roots back behind in Kabul, Kyoto, Linville ground too brown? Things waft. For once your bright mind failed you.

Just go off, girl. Go blooming, blooming.




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