Story.) A String of Red Beads...from A Circle of Swift Songs

A String of Red Beads                           

I SAW A ROW OF ANCIENT BOOKS upon a shelf. Of course, I had seen them there many times before, but this time I saw them: drawn to them. I took out a few and stood them up on the bedside table where the lamp was and turned off the main light. The lamp’s golden glow lit up the books and seemed to give them life shining on their gold-leaf writing pressed hard into their poor spines; broken, or about to break. I loved them. Not because I was interested in their stories. I did not know what they were. They were too hard for me to understand.  I had never read them. I just wanted to absorb what they were missing; write what they could not express and yet be just as beautiful.

   I think I had stepped outside the boundaries that imprison the child and make of it an adult and had escaped: I could do as I imagined I could do. So, very small, I slipped inside the books themselves; and, with their pages all around me, their pretty ways of stringing words together became an oil which poured itself into one of my many corners and quickened me. Suddenly that which was impossible, I could do; for I was a child and ‘a nothing person.’ From then on I wrote whatever popped into my head; and I was pleased. But it was not always easy.

   One day with inkpot and loosed feather I found myself writing what seemed to me a string of ripe-plucked cherries. The hard things I knew were their red, stone hearts; and the oil, fleshing out their inward parts in dreams and visions, the succulent part beneath their skins. Once eaten, there, strung on a black ink thread of words was a string of red beads. A living story-bracelet left me of life preserved by death. A gift of inner-life stories strung on a string of light! The light that shines in darkness!                                                 

                                               

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