Bonfire Opera by Danusha Lameris

Author:Danusha Lameris [Laméris, Danusha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822987284
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

SURFER GIRL

It happened yesterday at the Aloha Island Grill.

I was ordering lunch when the girl behind the counter

looked up at me and smiled. Her face—precise

high cheekbones, immaculate forehead—was smattered

with freckles, a contrast that was both delightful and reckless.

After she took my order, wrote it on the pale green pad,

I watched her dark hair swing about her slender waist

and felt, in the center of my chest, a quiet ache,

one I’ve since identified as the pain of witnessing

the beauty of the young—a malady I’d never before suffered.

How do the surfers who come in all day,

wiping their sandy feet, ordering barbequed chicken and beer,

bear the sight of her? She handed me my plate of teriyaki

with a side of rice, and I tried to picture how, at forty,

she might retain the underpinnings that hold her radiance in place:

the fine structure of her bones, the sharpness of her eyes,

perhaps a little rose left on her cheeks. And yet,

in that moment, I could see nothing that might mar her,

as if she existed on Plato’s plane of ideal forms,

of which this world can glimpse only flickering shadows.

Yes, sometimes it leaks out in a strain of violin, or the light

undulating from bare shoulder to gorgeous turned wrist

while pouring ice water from a plastic pitcher.

And, of course, in Nature’s own crescendos: white cliffs

rising from the sea, a field aflame with poppies.

But do we really need to be reminded of our exile?

Shouldn’t perfection remain hidden? How terrible

to sense, even for a moment, that there is another world,

one more ordered—and more kind—than this one. And how

oblivious she was, this girl, handing me the paper napkins,

the knife and fork, to the rift she had caused, so carelessly,

between this realm and the next.

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