The Gift
Poem - by Christine M. Du Bois
“Plunge!” the magician urged her.
The shepherdess gazed at his gilded robes
and his twinkling, periwinkle eyes.
She hesitated, contemplating the chasm.
But the spasms in her chest told her: it was time.
Tenderly then, she gathered the lamb into her arms—
the one a boy-man gave her, shyly,
four score of trodden years ago
when the sunlight was still fierce
and clean. And she stepped out,
dropping mutely, for fractal ages,
through sweeping mists of cyan tears,
until she and her little sheep
shrank
to a concentrated powder—like ricin, or love—
and landed softly on the man-boy’s
sage and weathered face.
But he did not know, and he mourned.
He thought it was simply her time,
and that she had left him,
falling forever.
She was so completely tiny now,
he could not see her in his reflection
when he shaved,
nor feel her, as joyfully, deftly,
she wandered through his features.
Sometimes, faintly, he heard the bell
merrily dangling from her sheep’s
warm and fluffy neck.
He wondered if it was the tinnitus of age.
He did not yet understand
it was the tinnitus of youth.
Sometimes, too, when the shepherdess
and her sheep gamboled, giggling,
he felt an inexplicable urge to smile.
And she—she found footpaths
to every wrinkle-valley, and
ambled down to verdant meadows
strewn with wildflowers, and up again,
following delicate purple veins
through pebbled hillsides,
serenading every hollow, every age spot,
every shift in texture under
her silken bare feet,
mapping every mountain and pasture and marshland—
she and her lambkin finding
in the landscapes of his body
a home. And their simple delight
in every centimeter of his aging self
bathed all his cells
in the gentle, fierce, clean sunlight
of liquid presence—
the light of a shepherdess
filled with gratitude
for the long-ago gift of a sheep.