The metal taste of my inner workings, the soap flavor of my fingers; before that, the abusive magic of a migraine, the tasteless vision of insomnia, a merger of damage and necessity. I am saturated, head-turned, throbbing, bent against a desk, between a window and a phone call.
I’m an addict of a different sort, a spare-time dominatrix, vinyl and velvet instead of leather and latex. A cold-coffee buzz kept me focused on the two people in front of me, who used me for foreplay, an object for their exhibitionistic fervor. The troop of deaf people behind them sprung rats from wooden boxes, and when the man in purple tried to spring one on me, I smiled, told him I’d seen it. The couple frowned, so he sprung the rat on them. I smiled again. My lips were enough.
* * *
Dish hand over fist, pumpkin candles burning behind me, waiting for my reaper to come home. When he removes his glasses, I can see where the make-up failed--the living flesh, raccooned in white and black, tart and slick. He’s a beautiful man, with whiskey-crystal eyes, and every year, no matter how mad I go, he gets more beautiful.
I remember the witch on the bicycle, suspended between two buildings, and two cats, the dirty taste of smoke that drove us inside, where the couple barely kept their clothes on. They assumed I was a voyeur, based on my leisure. I looked forward to long black couches and root beer, despite the autumn-winter bastard of clouds that kept me bitter but liberated all the way home.
* * *
He’s singing about coming, and I wonder what he means, really. I just like when he makes her wail, like when he whispers, and the blue lips are burned into the third eye, the fourth eye. A new harmony sounds like the kind of bleeding-heart emo bullshit that molasses out of my radio, when I’m not careful with the dials. It’s hard when the sun, in the guise of winter, slices between the inbred mix of evening and empty cotton fields (grey corduroy).
What does he mean, she’s ruled by the lion? I believe in the sacred nature of blood and water, and the unmixability of iron and silver. Glass. Mirrors. White-haired man with a red-sweatered young man, their strides matched. Waiting for someone to walk into the fountain, distracted, umbrella useless. Aquarius, water. To sleep on the stones under the myrtles, the birches, the oaks. I suppose I’m ruled by sleep, or seasons, or something equally as rustic and ridiculous for a city girl.
* * *
It wasn’t my wreck, which is good for the soul, forced to sit beside a turned field in a mild afternoon. Talk of “troubled” souls. Talk to troubled souls. Coppery taste of metal in my mouth again, the dry smell of shampoo and strawberry bubble gum. A boy in the plaza rubs his face, opens his water bottle—it shines silver in the sun—and smokes. I want to talk to him, see if he sounds like my beautiful husband.
Willow wood. Apple wood. Cherry wood. Bone-smooth, stone-shiny wood—hair at a distance, in the sun. Buttery underside of dying leaves; I’m dwelling on these things because I can’t get to them, wherever they may be. Couple in black, baby in pink, cross paths, balding head, the boy moves.
* * *
Pad and pencil, scissors and a guide to the minerals of South Africa. He looked at me like I was crazy when I told him how to get where he was going. What? Laughter. What? Shade from shade, bench to café, wind to plastic bag, nothing moving without gusty encouragement. Even the rocks, the people, the helpless tendrils of hair on the brunette as she walks, head-down, by my window.
Leaf-blower, wind-mocker, blue sky, sordid hum of machines, bitter taste of metal recurring, crystal balls and the bemused smile of the Hanged Man…tightening in the diamond choker when I swallow, knowing the limited relief of a black sweater with a white button-up (that’s his my favorite, mine his black corduroy button-up).
* * *
Small notes on the speakers, her jade earrings, the click of a keyboard, the paranoid trill of the phone. Over the holy roads, the sacred side-streets and nameless paths, whispers change, self-contained, singular, wondrous, baiting clocks and stealing watches, until the chimes mean more, and I think about the metal workings of the demigod in the tower, and the soap scent of the dryads in the bathroom.
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11.16.05
MWL
