of her universal house

Always there is Hannah and Paige filling their pots with flowers, putting on skirts and shoes and singing ridiculously to the Messiah that I can hear loudly even in my room. There are the other girls too, and the circles of their busy school lives go by the marvelous calculation of syllabi. There is also Meg and she comes into my mind like she was last night, standing elevated on the stool in the kitchen, her hair waving neglected about her shoulders, her fingers intently separating an orange. For me their is the strange boy, with his long bony fingers and the trees that he thinks keep him warm at night and his searching face seeing me in his strange way, and there's the wall of his dark eyes, like a room with all the lights dim. There is the field by the trees too, and the night-birds with their haunting cry fading up into the sky. Looking for their shapes against the stars echoes other places in my mind. Far away their is Lake Michigan - perhaps beating inhumanly against the rocks in the cold, perhaps sleeping calmly while the sun sets in gold and lavender. It holds the city in it's arms, and the city grasps at the stars too, reaching up, and blaring back an answering light. The wind is the mediator between the sky and the lake and the streets and maybe the students on their bicycles know it. I think also of the hills I go to when I'm home, and of their silhouettes at night rising hauntingly against the same expanse of stars, and I think of being lost in them in the day, and being far above everything human, and the deer and the birds' nests on the sides of the hills, and nothing but miles of walking and searching to ever return me to people again. Their's a city I think of on this coast too, and a great bridge that takes me to my Uncle's place, among the eucalyptus landscape, and the vineyards turning gold and red for the fall. Then there are the forests, cold and moist and shadowy, and drifting with smoke from our fire, and their's back home to the barn again, for long talks and cigarettes and the warmth of piles of blankets. Oh, also, there's the places in my dreams. There's a friend who's only ever in my dreams, and when I think of her in waking, I wonder if she's real anymore. Last night, strangely, there were my sisters and I selling food in a booth, and there was a swing in it, and the moonlight came in and touched us strangely. And there was the feeling of dried roses. Somehow there was my art professor too, and I kept saying to him, "What should I be doing?," and he never answered much until he was going out when he said "If you would, read through the Greenburg essay. I want to decide if I should assign it to the class." Oh, there are beaches with rocks and little crabs, and there are colors of the water, and there is the spring rain on the long grass under the trees, and on the just-born bulb flowers, and there are places I've never been, with hills, and rocks to climb under a great spreading still sky, with only the birds wheeling, and the broken walls of centuries ago. There are the places of the sky and the clouds and the stars that maybe I'll never be, and after that, there are only the places that you die to.