so she howls.

A young girl used to eagerly await the mailman’s delivery, fighting with her younger sister about who gets to check the mailbox. It was a different time.

But, now, the mail comes all the time and you cannot hold the words like you could when they came on paper. Pealing of bells sound now to herald any incoming communique.

No one checks their box, these boxes check us.

And, chess becomes a frivolity of a checkers game.

She remembered sailboat life. Never being dry.

She remembered life landside where everyone seeks to be wetted in swimming pools, baths, and showers.

She recollects stories her grandmother told her of boxcar hobos making x’s with tree branches woven through the chain link fences of certain homes. And, of kissing soldiers working POW camps, through a chain link fence of a compound in rural Louisiana.

She recalls other things and her cheeks bloom scarlet.

Things recent and things well-aged; things imagined; things that may yet come.

In her solar plexus, a bloom of a blackhole’s burn consumes her inside to out.

Pert rosebuds puckering.

A presentation of a revelation. Where space may take back anything which it enables.

And, suddenly, she is no longer Narcissus, but Goldmund.

The Lover enlivened through Death.

And, sometimes it hurts, so she howls.