My Love Is a Hidden Child

She was conceived gradually

a tender-skinned fruit swelling on the branch

timid sweetness, yet untasted

she ripened over months, years

born from the seed you planted

with your voice, with the language of your hands

in your absence

she sprouted, burst into full blossom, a fragile rainbow

today, she is a solemn flower

trapped in the greenhouse’s perspiring jail

roots straining against her clay pot

tendrils searching, probing the crevices of walls

cloistered in her meager room

demure, frail and slim-bodied

opaque as a February sky

emerging sometimes from the closet’s dim corners

behind a doorway, or clinging limply

in velvet drapery, a mute spider in its web

solitary and pale, dodging fragments

of sunlight in a dust-painted attic

shrouded, a medieval maiden in a tower

her body folded away behind stone and tapestry

on good days she is allowed to play in the garden among the June roses

and the primly sculpted hedges of boxwood

her hands are permitted few things – to thread a needle through cloth

delicate fingers to brush her own hair

slender wrists to strum guitar strands

anything that does not cause a commotion

she is an unresolved chord

in first inversion

sometimes I think she is without substance

translucent as a film of rain on pavement

other days she weighs me down, a little anchor

a heavy gem on a chain, enveloped between the breasts

she knows her every breath

is a secret

she feeds on images

eats pieces of your body:

the slivers of skin that emerge behind cloth

glimpses of your neck beneath the collar

the forearm within its sleeve

an arch of the neck

with each encounter, she flourishes

engorged with the intimacy of your body

the longer your absence, the more she wanes

often she starves

she suspects she is cherished

but lives in perpetual fear of abandonment

her mornings are spent listless

watching the sky’s shifting arc of light

listening to the rain’s monologue

on the windowpane

during long afternoons she hugs her knees

weeps noiselessly

on a narrow, winding staircase

whimpers echoing off damp stone

her most fervent wish:

that one day she can crawl out of the cave of my mouth

that I will lead her by hand out into the sunlight

enclosing her in a public embrace

for now, she lingers

feeds on thin wafers of hope

on the unspoken song of eyes

on your fecund glances

she lives in the whispered hours of the in-between

her life is ambivalence

she is always waiting

Inspired by Phillip Houghton’s “Lament”

J. W. Waterhouse