salamanders

when i was tiny,
and every eye-level of my grandmother's house
was loud brass and cream-and-terra-cotta velour and
a glazed-pine smell which tingled my bottom teeth -
when late-afternoon rains
fizzled to living mist, and the long deep dirt-grooves
gushed with miniature rivers for miniature hands and feet,
and the light seemed filtered through dingy linen clouds, thick and golden
and rich against the skin, and the trees were never so green but in that gold -

i broke out, ginger-toes curling
then relaxing against rain-cold grass
as flushed skin cooled and glowed, as hair breathed the rain and air
into itself and became wild and gnarled, as my body
exhaled that house
and the ashes of it
were borne away as light-bugs in the dusk: i

would hunt salamanders

in my small bare feet, i would stand and survey to start forward, chilled toes curling momentum
in pebble-sand until, i knew, they would find
those miniature riverbeds already running scarce, the sharps giving way to
God herself, laughing in wait, in those smooth, warm signatures of melted snow fallen months before,
shimmering my name - she had sprawled wide and lush and intertwined herself with me, her name and mine a new word, rivulets and ringlets and braids and swirls like initials, new every evening, and she held my heart warm
in her hair, and
like an infant to the breast, like
the dark, liquid-blooming senses even before:
i knew to go to her; i knew she was.

the salamanders stood neon in that dark-gold dusk against their wills
against the fingers barely grasping, delicate as a mother should, against a hard yellow plastic picnic basket, for a time,
against fantasies of community, names, marriages,
travails and triumphs,
dampness on cheeks,
mansions of sand,
raised voice(s) and
God - she swelled
in witness, always,
to the breathless dramatics
of tiny creatures
in the dark