Monday, March 27
SWEET FIELD ANEMOIA anemoia (n.) --- nostalgia for a time you've never known coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows There was, at one time, an empty field. I'm sure of it. Or, was it a forest so jaded that a vine snake's darting left only a glare, like light breaking over rolling grain . . . No, I know there was a field because I miss it--- in brush languid as a forest slinking into jaded slumber, dragging floor-dwellers at its outskirts like a tulle train, the land trodden by what once bent its grasses with breath. God, what we could do without yesterday, its forested jaundice, its sepia fog. With the prologue we ourselves sowed, a terrain thick with memory of unbodied lush. Florid. A forest of stalks. Weeping, it shone like jade in the easy sun. Yes, there was warmth. Sugarcane. A sweetness. Or even just its thick simulacra. It whispered like sound in an adjacent forest, an aria unflattened by my failure to prove it real . . . Believe me. I'm sane, I swear. I remember the pasture, the soft sickle of a new leaf. Each shoot its own forest with only jaybirds and lace bugs coming between stems and their rain. Listen, I know this field. It never held a soul. No tree -bark backs. No forest of bowed limbs. No blue jaws. No ambered-over sores. Only green thoughts. Only the mundane. (Ariana Benson)