Beginning
She is horse-hoof dust and the lazy rays 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
authumn 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.
Middle
And in the dark she sees 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 fireflies. Underneath a bursting moon twenty years
elapse and soon the
sun is up and she is cloth: Mathilde in the dirt...
End
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 wonder at the people with the caterpillar fingers and the cat
claws, the beetle
wings and clothes of lichen.
Now she hears a sound, a caravan approaching and the 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...