she tends to focus on the phases and forget about the faces. she studies so closely how resemblance dissembles that she trips on her shoes’ traces and gets trapped when trading trembles. she’s one of those unfortunates, so sensitive to gravity, who end up treating dancing as diminutive depravity.
she loves structural color, like rainbows and redshifted stars. she builds glass cages for catching light, keeps total internal reflection in jars on the mantle above her false fire.
“higher, always higher! that’s where you house your dexterity when i dowse your hexterity–your nimblesse at vexing the text, don’t you know? that’s where all the good gewgawed gods go. so cheat the shoulder, tilt the head, avert. aver. shrug. examine the rug. don’t let them hear your purr.” thus she advises the gestating glimmers; sharply her glances lance through their soft shimmers.
she goes surfing on the surface of [t]he[i]r sight’subjected matter; riding the reflections, she’s foreshortened and backscattered until all those outer edges twist to touch like sorrow seeking sleep, and mass and motion mean so much she melts down into distant deep.
but dreaming is not drowning, even at the height of day, and when she wakes out of that wash, she has this wish the will to say:
“until i’ve gained some distance from my unconditioned eye, i’ll keep no glass or glamour in between my hearth and sky. to concentrate, to consecrate, in reticence to radiate, and always to wear wind shall be my task. so mote it: give it dust to show the rays where light is falling [c]lean enough to ask.”
so goes the story, so goes the tale: this is how the earthenactress first takes up the veil.