MY FRIEND MURONG


WHITE GIRL, onyx spun silk of hair, white skin lazing naked in a bed of flowers, prayer and cries to the timorous sky, dozing, weeping and bending in water drops as the morning maiden of the petal world wake, yawn and stretch to the fire God, not like her, so sad, threads of hope and a mind unwinding, wondering why she is alone, clipping her white wings, why the sun tinges her alabaster skin and burns her souls, desert breasts, mettle tested and reconstructed as her night dreams become nightmares, cycling, rotating, shearing into a fabric of ripped apart seams.

Morning breeze, summer char, porcelain women mending her disquietude, impaired, imperfect, holding an immaculate heart, the saffron fire ball, sizzling tinge, incandescent mind, her eyes a gazed at sepia clouds of chalk twined trails, she is naked, paper thin, as the wind she seeks, pries, gossips, struggles to grasp, to digest what has become of her, where she has gone, why she had disappeared as the cumulous murmurs have, high, lost, mysteriously and forever along the horizons as her heart has.

Who is she? Why is she? So beautiful, delicate as a white nude pearl, a valueless vagrant vagabond with no home, no memory of her past, but clear realizations of what she has become, a transient of memories, an error of judgement, a secular solemn savant of misery, pain, grief, and arrow of loneliness, loveliness pierced with gold and rings, alive as the organ that recycles her blood, allows her her brain to survive as her spirit dies, her hope coming apart, tattering, ripping and in her mind it can never be mended again.

It is summer, the valleys sweep along forever, past the stalks of wheat and there is hope, for the heat always brings such natters along with the Sun, after winter dies, the cold flees, yet why, why is there water in her grey eyes once the color of sapphires, why does she weep, where are her clothes, so young, so brittle, so elegant, do dangerous now, his hands, his voice, his anger, her man no longer fitted to her skin, once again, once more there is only ache, failure, blame and the color of indigo is everywhere, the sky, her heart, her eyes and the blue, hard metal tint of a handgun barrel she nestles within the flower stems of her white langid lily finger tips.

The pewter V within the sky, the great winged honkers, led, alive, returning from winter homes, warm now a migration of life and memory return as it is for her, children safe, spawned from their bellies, babies she feels she will never see, never know and it is quiet except for their feathers streaming against the thermals, moving to the marshes, the ponds, awaiting journeys end, her end, the acidic taste of iron vis-a-vis her lips, six brass grins smiling, the safety of the rivers of death, allowing no such horrors ever again, for as nature swallows all back to the soil, a single gun shot reverberates, disturbing nothing, for nature eats flesh, dissolves skin and hurt within its soil, and from her blood all will be reborn, fresh, anew and in the cosmos of reality, she, her, this pallid women will hardly be remembered or ever missed, thus is the way of the earth. But a hand, a gentle hand, a man nudges her from her destiny, and a face as sweet as the sky doves weeping along the clouds turns, sees him, a stranger, and he has turned her away from death and takes her spindle body in his arms and lays her quietly in the flowers, she smiles, she sleeps as he pets her, whispers to her all is fine, and then she is again asleep, for within his gaze she is protected and this she has never known before.

Thus is destiny. Thus is mortality and the odor of cordite. Thus is the story of the white women of the flowers.