THE HOUSE OF THE SUMMER
Sep. 15th, 2010 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fulseldenSeries: Avatar
Characters: Ursa
Rating/Warnings: G. Poetry!fic.
... I don't know either, man. At least I had her mete out gory death yesterday. And why does the Victorian web feel the need to inform me what a gusset is? Even I know that!
The city lies under the summer
She takes in some mending, sews up in her own room.
For the mosquitoes, she uses cheap incense.
She allows her sharp stitches to tally the distance.
The fly-papers hang down like banners,
White sweetness unrolled in the still house.
In the green fields behind their old beach house
They ran after fireflies all summer
The nets out behind them like banners.
He weighs her salt-sticky hair in his closed room.
The children fill out the long distance
Their small voices spill off like incense.
She carefully deadheads the incense
And, being alone in the dark house,
Her finger and thumb mark the distance
The air in between them sharp summer.
She lets short fires smudge out the small room,
From each of her fingers their banners.
She remembers the movement of banners
The air fat and sagging with incense,
The women furled up in their own room.
They stood in the robes of the red house,
They stood for the crowds at high summer,
The children between them, their eyes on the distance.
She does not object to the distance
Close and familial, under the banners
Under the stretch of the summer,
Hair stiff and crunchy with incense.
She left children behind for the red house,
She left a wet red thing shut up in his own room.
She left her sharp youngest shut up in her own room.
Red women must set out to cultivate distance.
Their work lasts the length of the high house,
The names stitched out right down the banners.
Years later they are left sticks of incense
Planted before them each summer.
She belongs to the house of the summer
Her room is still tacky with incense.
She unrolls her distance like banners.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-20 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-20 08:45 am (UTC)