Cinema Strange Mathilde In The Dirt
She is horse-hoof dust and cloth and the lazy rays of
sun will squat upon her unblinking eyes.
She moves sadly through the woods, hanging from the
back of a caravan, thread and nail have caught her
hand.
She relinquishes her grasp and tumbles to the earth, to
the wheel ruts, a tangled heap of calico.
She sobs dryly for the girl who whispered like a leaf
in the autumn-time, with winter skin and breath of
clover.
Now she's all alone, immobile in the dirt and she can't
change her face to greet the evening pressing, cold,
around her.
And in the dark she can see new faces; silver like the
dew-reflected moon... They laugh at her dress and sing
like wind in the winter-time, wildflower tongues and
moth-wing ears they sing:
"We have a doll from a human child! Hey, hey!
We found her floundered in the dirt! Hey, hey!
Her eyes are painted pools of water! Hey, hey!
Her skin is frost on the velvet skull of a fallen
deer!"
And in the dark she can lift her head! Silver arms and
hands help her dance and blink like a firefly!
Underneath a bursting moon, twenty years elapse and
soon the sun is up, and she is cloth: Mathilde in the
dirt...
She would gasp in disbelief and she would bend her face
with crimson smiles were it not for the daylight, were
she not a pile of stuffing!
She knots her brains remembering each leap beneath the
gnarled and starlit treetops, her flight through
hanging willow curtains...
She wonders at the people with the caterpillar fingers
and the cat-claws, the beetle wings and clothes of
lichen!
But now she hears a sound, a caravan approaches and she
shivers in the dust! Her girl has come to find her!
Now she's held aloft, a woman cries and dries her eyes
on lost Mathilde from decades past who wandered far and
wandered back!
