vertical horizons
The simple grid pattern of the rose garden: too straight and orderly rows of the labyrinth-demanding roses.She coaxes him into eating a red petal already plucked and in repose in the palm of her hand, soft as the palm of her hand.
***
They part, he with a bitter aftertaste in his mouth.Their relationship ended; irreconcilable delusions.
He enters the TimeLine Diner and joins X., sitting opposite her in a far corner booth, their shadows cast separately on adjacent walls.
***
It was not their usual silence, the silence of stillness and immortality, but a dialogue of silence between them.
***
X. concludes with a lowering of her head, her hair closing like a luxuriously weighty stage curtain over the scenery of her face.
***
He rises from his side of the booth, rises towards her, past her, against the pale blue wall behind her, and swiftly kisses her shadow farewell.They were on different planets, and neither had the energy to build a spaceship.
They sit, as usual, in the corner booth; she nestled in the corner, he with his back to the rest of the diner. Behind her he sees two walls meeting to form a corner, behind him she can see the goings-on of the other patrons. They come here often and always sit in their respective seats of this corner booth, sometimes to sort out misunderstandings rooted in such conflicting perspectives.
In a restaurant the two share an intimate, candle-lit dinner. He notices her mind wander away from their table-for-two to an attractive man sitting at the single's bar across the room; he wonders why it should, from their rare and exquisite world to a world common and frivolous. Watching her eyes linger over that other, he thinks that he can see a transparent, spiritual form of herself rise from the chair of her body and stroll over to the bar; it was like watching her die and leave him forever.
"You are the exact same height as my husband," she said, still in their embrace, after their kiss.
A man who asks his wife to relay the details of her infidelity. Is this masochistic curiosity? It is his desire to replace in history the man with whom his wife was unfaithful, through possession of this intimate knowledge. The panic and anguish he feels upon hearing those details: hat-pins pushed into his chest, dully piercing his lungs and the meat of his heart.
After an exchange of increasingly long and cruel letters, one of the ex-lovers sends and the other receives an envelope gorged with neatly folded sheets of stationary, all of them blank.
Is her pruning necessary to prevent the overgrown, wild love which struggles upward and against itself, blocking out all the light? Are all of these truncated limbs the undeserving, greedy ones of jealousy? He dreams of lying with her beneath a tree whose branches bow on all sides with the weight of fruitless, foolish length.
He watches the worry lines of his pale, middle-aged face blur in the vibrating rear view mirror of a Greyhound bound to forget everyone. He's been on this bus, this road before, but then only during daylight, and only to return home that evening. But tonight he's taken care of everything: necessities in the small suitcase he smuggled to work this morning; telephone call to his wife telling the lie that tonight he'll work late. Now that there's nothing left to arrange, nothing to do but ride, he can recline his seat, close his eyes.
***
He remembers how soundly he slept last night beside his wife, but how he woke earlier than usual because of a sharp pain behind his left ear, a pain so sharp he had touched it with a fingertip to see no blood was drawn. Something in his pillow, he had thought. Now he dreams it was the quill-tip of a feather long, broad and rigid enough for flight somehow mixed in with the warm, soft down of his pillow - an image he wakes with upon arriving at the station.
***
He phones his wife, pretends he is still at work: he won't be home for another hour, two hours; she shouldn't wait up. He asks if the kids are asleep; they are. He buys a ticket for the next bus home.
***
He sits on the edge of the bed in the dark, gently, so as not to wake his wife. He runs his hand lightly over his pillow, then feels it firmly for the feather he has in mind, the feather meant for flight buried deep within soft down. He doesn't find it. His wife doesn't wake. He flips his pillow over for the night.Zoltan sends Zsa Zsa a love letter.
***
She sends him an affectionate response.
***
Zoltan sends Zsa Zsa a love letter addressed to Attila.
***
She sends Zoltan increasingly long and cruel letters.
***
Zoltan sends Attila a letter addressed to Zsa Zsa.
***
Attila opens the envelope engorged with stationary, all blank.
***
On them Attila begins to write.Dream of walking naked through a desert at dawn. He stops, panting, and lays down in the sand, his feet pointing towards where he is heading, his head towards where he's been. Laying in the desert sand, panting more furiously than before, he ejaculates over his chest and belly. He rolls over, onto his belly, and, propped up on his elbows, his back covered with sand, looks back across the ground he has covered. Instead of footprints, he sees the side-winding tracks of a snake. Alarm.
***
Alarm. Laying on his belly in bed, he whose ears have opened before his eyes, opens his eyes to find, from the plateau of his pillow, not the woman he loves but a desert-- beige bed sheet rippled by her body risen like a sudden gust of wind across his expanse of sand. He inches over to the pillow still holding the hollow left by her head, peers into this abyss to breathe the buoyant, lingering perfume of her hair. He would like to wring from this pillow all she has not told him, all her secret dreams.Antique shops, where everything, branded with fingerprints, is connected with a nearness made visible: dust-laden cobwebs. Possessions dispossessed by death, donated or sold by the sons and daughters of the recently deceased, possessions which once surrounded the deathbed like patient mourners accumulated over a lifetime. Do possessions ever amount to anything more than mourning mannequins? Are they what held the bed room walls back so long? Or was it this transparent one who still sits heavy in the depressed cushions of the easy chair; the one who hid beneath the incredibly empty clothes sharply folded for tomorrows, tucked into the bottom drawer of this old oak bureau; the one who's thumb wore down the lamp key of this lamp no longer standing on the night table?
***
In antique shops I imagine myself all the previous owners of these objects, imagine myself all these objects. It is my desire to be everyone, everything-- my desire for immortality.
***
And the mystery of used books surpasses that of other previously owned objects; they were more intimately handled, they engaged the consciousness of their previous owner.
***
So too the possibility of women and men molded by the hands of previous lovers. For the sake of metaphor let me assert that a god created woman and man from lumps of clay. Wouldn't then lovers be sculptors who continually alter and refine, each the other, with hands, lips, tongue, arms, legs and torso the entirety of the other? Sculptress and sculptor using their entire selves as tools to create the non-utilitarian arte d'object the other is and will be.Cassette tape ready to play an old love song at the push of a button, dusty stuffed toy kangaroo permanently on the verge of springing forward, book purchased from the shop down the street set atop another bought miles and years from where he now stands. . . . Possessions are the fossils of memory, his life the strata suspending and manipulating that memory. Each successive epoch born from a variety of catastrophe.
***
Catastrophe as natural fact, beyond the positives and negatives they contain; just as her sudden presence in his life is a catastrophe which exterminates and births certain species of his being. For her his bed room is a museum of possessions: dinosaur bone wall displays found in museums of natural history, and displays obscured by her own reflection, as if she sees them under glass protecting another's past. She sees a mandible, a metacarpal, a fleeting concatenation of vertebrae. . . . These she may connect with tendons, muscles to flex and move them, to make them gesture, speak to her, "You have fleshed me with your own imagination."How difficult the end of a relationship, even when it is willed by one or both lovers; but how impossible it must be when that end is willed by death, against the wishes of lovers. To never again see, touch, taste, smell, hear one you would be with and who would be with you. Imagining this, I become nauseous, grow cold and numb as though let of blood, and my mind, searching for my love, finds only insanity.
Lingering among autumn woods to mourn the end of love. Chill in the air and the body’s response-- twitching muscles, little sobs of corporeal mourning. (And don’t forget the slate sky.) And of course the slate sky. Intermingled extremes of what was for so long monochrome green: dark, thin, brittle patches of absence, of leafless branches, but intermittent with explosions of golden and rose foliage.
***
Night flare shot from one sinking into dark water, less for help than to see something, be dazzled by something one last time.Lovers come together like the wings of a butterfly at rest. When it departs, they part, perhaps briefly brushing against each other while it flies. These lovers are, however, always connected by the body, which recalls the chrysalis.
She is the woman with the penmanship ideal for writing the word "alas."
Caress a cat a woman holds to her shoulder, and it is as though you are caressing her.
Computerized matchmaking services for which candidate age and annual income constitute adequate information. Quantities, not qualities.
Two women, one day: one midday, one that night.
In this photograph the bride standing in the fore of and flanked by her bridesmaids is Miss America crowned before her competitors. The elaborate and lavish gown, crown and bouquet setting a single woman apart from the crowd. Are beauty pageants and weddings after all so different? Each is, in a sense, both marriage and contest.
Is the purpose of marriage ultimately to prop up an inevitable corpse?
Vertical Horizon: the invisible horizon running at least the length of each human being's body; the essence of the other and ourselves perpetually approached by others and ourselves; the corner to be turned inside a labyrinth which, once turned, perpetually presents more corners.
The billiards game of flirting on the Paris Metro. Straight, short shot to the one sitting across from you; acute bank off the tunnel-darkened window, reflection of the one sitting beside you; obtuse window bank to one three rows away. I've never managed a double bank, a reflection of a reflection of the ideal woman.
Identity. It is not uncommon for strangers to walk up to me and ask if we have met before, "perhaps at the whereyougo . . .," or if I have a brother "who works at the overthere . . . ."
***
A face that does not declare itself, a template of a face, a face that is no more than the simplest definition of a human face.She has a face like a Rorschach test inkblot, which is why, oddly enough, people find her so beautiful.
He will never reach her vertical horizon; but love causes him to run towards it, full into the field.