by Frances Boyle
Her dirty feet, soles exposed, appear large as her head. She sits before a window or temple ruin. A closer look, and its verticals are not jambs or columns but tree trunks. Branches link overhead, smoky tendrils meld dark on shadow side with her smoothed-back hair.
And her face, steady half-profiled gaze, lilt of eyebrows, cheekbones. Full mouth uncurved into a smile. Bitchy resting face they’d call it now. Unlike me, she can resist the expectation for a primate fear-grin that telegraphs I’m harmless,
I submit, don’t kill me. She won’t make nice for the watcher—some see her ‘wary,’ some ‘brooding, ominous’. She is sure in her body, Her motion arrested only by her own volition, Her twinning with the tree. Her body outlines
one side of the opening, bend of waist, of elbow mirror the place where bark meets level ground, her head-tilt matches the tree-limb’s lean. Heward has made her girl a caryatid supporting the hazy arch of evergreen. How her neck seems gilded,
her arm glazed. It’s not marble the oil on canvas emulates though, but supple muscled flesh, swathed and bare. Cant of hip beneath deep red drape, of velvet perhaps, or nubbled jersey. Loose at waist and bust for dancer’s ease, dancer’s
movement in the world—solid-rooted, confident, no currying favour. I want that ease and seek to feel through fabric the black earth, slightly damp, to sense the yield of needle-bed against left haunch and thigh, along my bare calf, the top of my toes
where they press the ground. Can I hear the river, feel the wind that blurs the trees, how dirt has imprinted my naked soles? The Laurentians beyond, clouds piling up blue on them. Her uncompromising regard, green leaves sprouting succulent at her feet.
Frances Boyle is the author of two poetry books, most recently This White Nest (Quattro Books, 2019) as well as Tower, a novella (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2018) and Seeking Shade, a short story collection (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020). She is a Canadian author, living in Ottawa, whose writing has appeared throughout North America and in the U.K. Recent and forthcoming publications include work in Best Canadian Poetry 2020, Blackbird, Feral, Dreich, Event, Prairie Fire and Parentheses Journal. She reviews books for Canthius: feminism & literary arts and Arc Poetry Magazine. Visit www.francesboyle.com for more.
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