Girl Reading

With her bright head bent over her book, there flashes across the screen of her absorption, so many changing faces, we know there sleeps in her, as in all women, something of the Deity of the Navahos: the Changing Woman. She too, for brief intervals, is Child-of-the-Water, Mother-of-Heroes, even Router-of-Enemies, passing in swift gradations before our eyes from one or other guise: child to old woman, then back again. She too, as all women, slips in and out of impossible dimensions, returning to us so guilelessly untouched, that there are times when we are almost persuaded to believe that she is not the ever-Changing Woman, but eternally, a changeless girl.