Eva Colombo, Our gold, first chapter: Wintry dream ( Inspired by George
Price Boyce’s painting Pensosa d’altrui, 1869 )
If I were an enchantress I would turn the muddy water of a canal which the
January sun has just freed from a pale veil of nightly ice into a dress, a dress
suitable for those ones who go towards their lives fearless of getting spattered
with mud: this dress I would wear to appear in your wintry dreams. And the
January crescent moon which mirroring herself in the muddy water of that canal
turns her cold silver into warm reddish gold would become an heart – shaped
pendant which I would wear on this dress so that in your wintry dreams you may
be aware of my love is a love capable of turning mud into silver and gold. And
the hoarfrost drops which adorn the bare branches of the trees would become
pearls for my earrings, pearls beautiful as tears which bedew the soul and let
hope sprout again. And the shadow which an hedgerow casts on the banks of that
canal during the January sunsets, a shadow where sparkling tracks of hoarfrost
are footprints impressed by gentle ghosts so that passers – by wouldn’t lose
themselves in the dark, would become the curtain in the background of my
apparition. And on that curtain I would embroider the pansies which will bloom
in the hedgerow’s shadow when the hoarfrost will be melted: pansies which will
be violet and cold as my lips in the January twilight and golden and warm as the
spring sun, as the words which I would say to you. If I were an enchantress I
would appear thus in your wintry dreams… and maybe in spring you would love me. |
