Decembered Innocence

 My four-year-old daughter says she learned a new word. “Chrysanthemum, chrysanthemum, means flower in Spanish, daddy!” She says this as she dances with the anthem--auburn tresses spiraling her lithe frame spinning, twirling an imaginary lariat, “Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum!” 

She sounds it with such joy, the fervor of the first grandiose word she’s never spoken, so mellifluous the khrusos blast of Bach trumpets blaring across her synapses, before all the swaggering juggernauts of Oxford invade her with overcrowded catalogues of idiomatic intonations. 

I will her no altercations of elocution, struggling to the top of the monkey bars until a shoulder of phraseology pops out of socket and goes reeling--falling to the sandbox; the supercilious terms sojourn beyond her voice box and spurt off into the cold autumn air. 

Chrysanthemum, “I don’t know that word Elle, I think it’s a flower, but not in Spanish.” I chase my words into the wind ripping through her spirited mane lurching sideways through the elliptical pasture in her mind’s eye. She’s as Pegasus before a moniker, Medusa’s blood with no typing or taxon to latch on to--an unraveling spire of orthodoxy. 

Mercilessly, I chase her as Prometheus wielding fire and all
the knowledge that will gradually demystify her mutability, until she is merely my Pandora and chrysanthemums, just sunspot shadows on the frozen eyelids of Decembered innocence.   

-R.O. Murphey