One Leg, One Hat

The harridan stood standing, the weight of her thoughts weighing. The birds driving wagons of song into the cackle of a Como blue sky, or so it appeared in the mirror of her eyes. The eyes are not the mirror of the soul but the lead backing, silver flashing. She thought of her father’s hands and her mother’s ears, a child’s thumbprint in a curd of Play Dough. She thought weighting, this and that, something blue and something peach, her thoughts weighed with weightiness. Harridan’s and shamble leg men, men in hats and legless men, all mirror images, things, phantoms stitched one into the other. To see one is to see them all, a dynamic of many as one. One leg, one hat, one child’s thumbprint in a curd of Play Dough, an indexing of all and every: the one many one all. ‘Such a shameless hussy’ she moaned, ‘and me with my legs in tethers, piggly-wiggly me’. These them they are one two many, no less than a million: each all everyone one weighing and vectoring; leaving thumbprints in curds of Play Dough. The soul is the mirror of the eyes, so seethe the Lord all-musty. In rectory-rectus we trust, white gloms, the eyes are the portals of the knolls, in impetigo, cholera and whooping. The harridan’s thoughts spun and spun, weaving themselves into latticework lattices. Lambswool and curlicues and her mother’s bee-bitten lips, ‘and me with my legs in tethers, what a shameless hussy am I’.