afternoons
And in that, the texture, as I watched, of a towel tossed about her hips while she walks from room to room the little strings certainly unknotting at the touch of her skin each stretching strands to meet with the warm droplets on her underarms where she holds the whole mystical bunch together- she looks at me:
“are you just going to lay around all day scribbling in that silly book?” “what else is there?” “the day and it’s everywhere and noisy cars and spitting streets and crowds at theatres. The day, Robert, the day.” “it’s just another, like any other, like so many more filed in behind and coming outwards towards us, towards our death.” “I hate it when you’re maudlin.” “I’m always maudlin.” “I always hate it.”
And then moves she into the bedroom where she leans in careful to iron the inner sides of her corderoy pants (careful not to damage the lines let loose running the length of her legs just beneath the surface: she likes them warm when she wears them warm when she puts them on warm when she walks and then, setting to and through her task she sets the still hot iron up on the carpet (no worry of a fire, no not her, not here, not this) and pulls the pants upwards over her hips beneath the towel where I have no idea what kind of under-items she is wearing. Suddenly I want very badly to know. Not for any of the obvious sexual or lustful reasons, but rather, to know what it is and how she is layer upon layer and broken down as a peeled onion, exposed, naked in every sensible way and how she gets that way and how she undoes her nakedness by covering it. I tug at the towel:
“what have you got on under there?” “stop it. I’m trying to get dressed.” “and so our purposes just now are conflicting. Who should win?” “don’t play games with me. I have things to do.” I drop my hand back to my sides and turn my thoughts back to the words forming on the page rustling themselves out from these crooked fingers of mine and latching themselves like lichen onto the page where each and every each and one can be safe and held forever, beyond gravity, for the world to see and sigh before.
And they will. Won’t they?
I barely notice when she leaves barely as in hardly at all I hear, in the background of the ticking clock and tapping keys that the doors is opening and closing and she is now somewhere else, in the great beyond of the door, living on the planet that holds this but not me. I am trying to get beyond all that. That is what I am working on. But she is leaving, she is off and out into the big everywhere and noisy cars and spitting streets and crowds at theatres. She belongs to the world, though in some strange ways, it seems to me that it belongs to her, but really it is her lover and bends at her will and she at it’s leaning this way and that at it’s touch on the pads of her feet on arching tree branches that lean to shade her from the sun: the world knows more about the pleasure of her body than I ever will ever have ever could. She is only open to the world. To me, she is the radiance of the sun locked in a small glass jar. To me like that because she wills it in one quiet part of her mind or another, conscious or un, real or imagined and I am left to watch it happen, sparkling and miraculous, the movement of her every breath over the earth, but unable to care for it in any tangible way. She wills us to be two distinct planets and her will is the hammer of norse gods. Only these: my words my stories are mine to care for and tend to.
I would like to say that she enchanted me but what does that mean what goes into an enchantment and how strong must intentions be: we were just two people stumbling around in the dark.
