The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

One story more about your hair, my love, my ghost: once in 1931, fresh from Hong Kong, you posed for the camera in a silk dress, still as if stuffed, aware and not aware the foreign shores were home. Your bobbed locks, I once wrote, impossibly black, a tar waterfall marcelled as if to death - this was the hair we always saw on you, not the white, hood-like boy's cap we later cut and pasted to your skull. This was your brooding patina, your blood's (or our blood's) insistent reminder of itself. Tonight, I walk with the dogs out through the snow newly fallen, the crescent moon drawn up dawn-bright in the dark sky, and think - not of the you, but of the all of you. The now dull glances of your eyes, your hands on my hands, my own hands clutching back. What have you done to me? someone whispers, as another image of you slips past and I turn - Though in truth what have I not done to you, and what would I not do again to keep you with me? The you who were everything and nothing to me both, gone but for the details now, the sentimental. Remember?