Eleanor

When she answers
it’s as if

shell pink china chings against saucers as she serves herself another cup and two lips please or I’ll take one or a piece of chocolate pie perhaps and she’s the girl at the tea party all alone absorbed in the discourse of her dolls, so be careful with these cups my dears the china is so thin that it will cut your tongue out if you’re not careful if you’re not very careful
not
very very
careful

her voice is distant slim and reedy as a ballerina spinning on her toes and I wait to see if weight will win and over it will flop like a top scuttling across the hardwood floor it doesn’t stop

her words click like knitting needles pulling yarn around and in around and in until from the waning ball they coax a blanket for her to hide within
or these words they turn like smoke that rises up and out the window up and out and there she goes there she goes she follows

I want to show her an amber ring I love.
Its flaws are called inclusions, breaking
light into pathways for grace
I’ll tell her how:
Like a relic in an altar stone,
pieces of childhood
are wrapped in resinous sap
and buried
beneath the northern ocean
by an earthquake
or an ice age.

But a day will come
after a storm
perhaps
that they will float
one by one
to the surface
of a sunlit sea.

-Kitty Yanson