The Red Shawl

The face peers out, cautiously.

Out of a heavy mass of stone and its rigid geometry a woman is emerging. We imagine a dawn; a cherry tree sprouting on a rocky mountain side.

Yesterday’s ideas still hold her within their stark and weighty outlines.

Warily she looks around. Alert and vulnerable; a young guard on a watchtower, afraid of every sound; a bird cries; a squirrel runs along a tree… 

The body holds her down. To pull herself out of it, like a man out of a cave?

The eyes have moved. The lips are about to speak. Her expression forms. The once perfect circle is thickened by cheeks ripening into maturity. Already her head has shifted to the side; away from you the artist - the too solicitous parent. 

It is the shawl.

The shawl winds about her hair, snakes around her head, slivers over her chest to fall down her arms, where it slides underneath her breasts; that blossom under its touch.

Behind the red dawn, the blue and grey night.

The sun melts the hard and heavy forms of a frigid art. Soon the breasts will rise up, the arms fling themselves into liberating joy. And the stone, with a ripple and a swing, the stone will crack and splinter, and fall. Her skirt twirling above the rubble her feet joyfully kick and ecstatically crush.

Eve is reborn as a woman.

The frames - there are so many! - cannot hold her. Already she has outgrown the smallest one. Its blue a window: an invitation to a new day.

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