What Cannot Be Mine

Cassius Vuong / V Mag at UVA

“ Your ceaseless cease.” – Aracelis Girmay

I remember things –

how I saw the shadow people by the fire escape

     looking at me from the wide window at the building’s

                   tip top. Tip toes,

ballet slippers, little purple blossoms giggling, spells written on wet papers

burned and buried in mud.

The sun was always setting and rising

over and over back then.

     I became a treasure-hunter, the tired willow tree, the graffiti on the train.
                  You see me – littlegirl, fairygirl, girlygirl, girlsgirl, lovergirl.

  Now, woman alone walking in snow over her hills,

     all just places to me, from me, for me. I see me.

Those pink skies had a song. I would sing it back over

and over, knowing that magic only lasts if you notice it, 

squint at it, do your best to pinch it, not to let it go.

     Remember The Secret Garden?  That poor sickly boy in the bed?

They opened his wide windows to blind him. To save him.  

Oh, he could barely see all that dust outlining his sunlight.

Rumi says the dust’s dance is our dance – 

we don’t hear the inward music, but we are all dancing nevertheless.

I heard it in the church’s attic– swirling fractals of dirt

outlining Emmanuel’s stained-glass pink light.

Dust dances light into tangibility, physicality, shapes,

but all I have is memory.

Rebounding, ceaseless, then frozen-over – 

picture perfect,

the way the sun set and rose back then.

I know now, none of this is mine, but        

god,

how humans get these imaginings.