Ferns

He watched beautiful women, of an especially cultivated aesthetic, who began their

day with a tour of the central avenue, absorbing their periphery through a downturned gaze.
But their glimpse, a brief curiosity hitched on an ankle slightly exposed, a certain angled
posture signifying their near escape from this realm into one altogether divine, was noticeably
less striking than those hikes alone in forests of pine and of birch, when one happens upon a
broad expanse of ferns waving in tree-filtered light. In those moments, paralyzed, these ferns of
an acidic green seem to speak to us from an ancient depth, as if they reassured the spirit,
vulnerable in their sight, with lifes promise to always continue. Passing them, one moves in
finer air, and the sight of a lake seems everywhere to abound, and ones thighs finally cease to
ache from the sickness held since birth. And this memory, of a time when one forgot to forget,
finds a way to seep into times and spaces far removed from these blissful moments. Even in
the exclusion of a city, in the dead still center of winter, as when the chaotic passing of people
seems to one like a light breeze, or when the white light of morning warms ones front, but one
remembers above all, with a cheek pressed upon the flesh of a woman, slowly guided by an
invisible string in the chest, when one smells on her mound the unexpected scent of chalk a
sweet potency whose presence exceeds any possession; intoxicated, eyes pull towards the
back, and like a phantom they pierce the cavernous walls of the Spanish ghetto, its cedar
nightstand, its yellow light.

It is especially in winter, as the season crosses its midline, that the body feeds itself
bright sensations, memories, as the sea its own froth.