Thalia Selz
THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
Where is that green iron gate, swinging to with an
easy clang, hurled carelessly backward by my young hand as if
batted by an Amazon?
I woke precipitously last night, teetering back from the
dizzy
lip of tuinal sleep, hearing that pipe-stem gate creak and slam,
and the sleeping pill stuck in my throat like a chip of blue and
red ceramic tile. For no reason I was as afraid as if I were a
girl again-an adolescent girl whose periods have just begun and
who is panic-struck by the magnitude of her sins.
I did not get up and fling open the French windows to
inspect my charming Tyrolean wooden balcony, my geranium–
box, my compulsive
Seebach
rushing pell-mell and churning up
foamy spittle and make-believe racket like a mountain brook in
the movies. Or the soft, midnight walls of my valley-in the
daytime cropped, domesticated slopes: tilting, hummocky mat–
tresses for cows to lie on. At night cradled in wood-intimate,
old-fashioned wooden fences; wooden turnstiles, the spokes
crossed with stiff ceremony like arms in a folk-dance or chil–
dren's games ("... take the key and lock her up, my fair lay–
dee-e-e
!") ;
or long, cumbersome wooden gates, slow as a cow.
I knew it was not a cow gate. With a damp, mossy fear
born of guilt and drugs I fixed that swift, ominous, metallic
clank
as an intrusion from another world. I curled up icily,
trying this gate and that, poking and prying through the rubbish–
heap of childhood, floating over games and lawns, deep-sea
swimming among sidewalks, collie dogs, secret huts, dried skin
