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The Journal of Shirin Swift Goodness
12/26/2006 01:32 p.m.
Goodness
As her life progresses and she comes to inhabit multiple kitchens, her face too becomes more and more like a puckered sampler.
Daily she practices embroidering smiles onto unbleached calico cheeks not cut from fine damask but pink and ocher tubes with a touch of Alizarin Crimson straight from the tube for her ears and lips that will not reveal their beginnings nor ends as their stitches are sealed and neater than a wit's end.
I've come to call her Goodness, for she tries so hard to control herself from inside, yet fails to feel accepted. To be “at peace”. According to Goodness, to be at peace sounds unpromisingly, untemptingly temporal. It sounds like you're there for just such a short while and if you are sleep-walking or sulking you will definitely miss peace. Miss Peace.
Before she got to peace, she got to peace's door. It had a brass swan-head knocker. Through the window, she saw the swans - three white and two black and many gray cygnets - enjoying tea and buttered scones and chatting about welcoming her into their wings and songs and ponds and dragonfly séance...
| Member Comments on this Entry |
| Posted by Kathleen Wilson on 12/26/06 at 08:35 PM Very dreamlike-- and yet true to life...it reminds me of dreams with meaningful small details that one cannot forget... but also the dreamlike abstraction of waking expreience... I can easily imagine this "Goodness" as a real, older person, who sews dolls, and has her own philosophy of life... and who tells stories of places she's been...and how she came to where she is now, in her travels, mental and physical...I love the swans allusion and I can easily make up stories as to why that might be there, although it has a mysterious ring to it. |
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