In the quietness of my room (where the air is red)
curtains slip apart and my eyes slip closed and (close-up shot of teeth biting their red lip)
I walk away. You can remember what you’ve done, but not why you’ve done it.
You can remember what you’ve done, but not why you’ve done it.
You can deny that, the little beads of oil on your skin that
you try to wash away with water. The pitted impure surface of your face.
Your adolescent body slips into the water.
There is a cool river. A green roil of love.
There are trees there; trees you’ve seen before when you were
a very young child. There are trees there that put you in mind
of your hand curling around the finger of your mother.
There is a current that looks like a solid thing, like you could
taste it, and it would be better than ribbon candy.
There is a long way to fall. You hang, Missionlike
on a long brown cross and over over ice
over ice on the rocks into the blue roar of movement
music like a dying experiment into your thrashing soul.
There is white water there is a pounding sound, the spray
and the mist and your own young changing body bound up in that.
There is a smell of chemicals.
There is a soft blue cloud, something you forgot.
The suspension of the silk-soft bodies in aerial liquid,
the dance of portions of races in gold and rose sweepings
against a blue, blue sky. There is an eye as deep as space and time,
but pale, pale and open. There is no atmosphere that hides you from that eye.
There is the English-garden drift of snowflakes over the little brown leavings of flowers, over the light of the garden lamppost, onto the waxen white surface of the snow. There are her fingers, the way they lilt over the ivory keys of the piano, the soft singing of her. The way you look up, the warmth of that living room, the movement of your nerves, stumbling tongue.
There is a smell of chemicals.
And you walk back, back over the great walls of the city, into the velvet-trimmed red-scarf dance of the city girls, into the avalanching noise of the city men, into the hands of the city fathers, painted and painted by the city children and you,
you are, you are getting late, tired,
and you, your fists are no salvation
no salvation
no salvation at all.
Purpled against the night sky, her arms are bruised now, her white wrists with the marks of your thumbs, the aural defects of her body are too new for you. You can’t quite understand where she came from, where she was going. You thought you knew her, and then again, perhaps not. And you thought you knew her. But then again, perhaps not. And so it goes again. Purpled against against against the night sky she is not like a banner, too bruised on her white arms, but she is like a banner and she is dancing against the dusk like wine.
And you portray yourself, the red and burnt-gold squares of paint, the daubs, the brushstrokes, the model, the painter. There are things you know of yourself, and those things you paint in, but what of your questions? What of the things you wonder to yourself and never speak of? What of the little codes, the half-shadowed inclusions that you never confess to yourself? And you delineate, and you deny, and you debate, fracture,
dissipate into countless pieces on some floor of marble tile. And that is too hard, too chemical. You wrap yourself into a pale fog, you wrap yourself in the aural liquid of music and acousiomatic, until no one recognizes you.
And no one recognizes you.
pretty neat!!!!!
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