Homesick for the mousepit
a rat’s whisper draws the day
to its close …
Who wrote that? a thin voice teases.
No use lying. She did.
‘Lowlands’, a purplish, demure volume as I recall,
much favored as a courting gift
from sensitive young men
with only one thing on their mind
to raven-haired, petal-lipped young women
with another thing on their mind.
Wild to play with wild,
to pray only for such things
as led to a diminishment of noise.
How mere hospitality
might pause a god’s rampage,
looking round, seeing
for the first time.
She was a great exhibitionist,
attended by those who had never expected,
as their welcome so obscenely revealed,
the gullible gibbet and its pretended rise.
How the women of Carthage (matrons, virgins,
in-betweens) gave up their hair
for the dying city’s last-gasp catapults.
How we are all, in simple fact,
moving together towards the Star of Vega.
Her reading was wide and more-than-dilettante.
Partisan, misspelled as ‘parasite’,
corridors thick with vampires,
dishes waiting to be cleared away
from oh my lady’s chamber.
Avocados peppered with salmon roe,
a squirt of lemon juice
in the voyeur’s shell-shocked eye,
that in the excess of her hypodermic mercy
she chose to let him survive the night,
leaving him free to crawl away,
blind, naked, down the glistening stairway of shivered glass,
easing not at all the finer friction of money on flesh,
to slide against the white backgrounds
which another had constructed
with an addict’s patient skill,
as though each season were tense
with her wintry coming.
A brocade of starving martins, at flinch in the rain.
One of her talismanic phrases,
to be carried in a whisper,
something to be hinted at,
always just taken off display,
away from Proteus and his hired eyes.
Strawberry lingerie beneath a sensible,
an unremarkable ensemble.
She was on call, on permanent edge
for the confessor’s nudge.
Her purse of flesh, her geography
that men were so taken with.
Many misread (and not only
her battalion of lovers)
that tantric composure,
sexual discipline that peacocked
its claim to harmlessness.
Desire’s filigree ran melting
over her ankles.
To judge a pint by its foam,
sedimentary polluted brown,
to warm in the china of her gorge.
And if the modestly scandalous truth
were known, the background
flushing to a pinker, breezier fabric,
real-life tapestry to those
in the cheap seats.
For was there ever woman
more foreign to herself than she to she?
His cock a buoy,
her quim the evening star.
Subterfuge, chicanery, one-upmanship.
Typhoons of windy boasting.
Long afternoons in the company
of prima donnas would wear down
all but the most famished soul.
Even the bottom-rung groupies
took on a dull and weary look
as the claims and counterclaims,
the idle digs and namedroppings
flew past their room-to-let heads,
spun round their slender, asset-laden bodies.
Lethargic and featherweight,
one could have knocked them over with a spoon,
and consequently many did.
Which brings me, at last,
to a consideration of recklessness
and the institution of betrayal
(its sequences, categories, acidic charm)
and not coincidentally, the fabled words
of kindness and forgiveness.
One of them but not both of them.
That, my dears, was the intimate fairy tale.
One-time goddess, her thighs a forked path
of depilated efficiency.
Caged, neurotic panther, the slow hump
of the Sierra Madre, lewd and
prizewinning sandstorms.
And Proteus would always show up.
Would wait, loitering with superficial
impatience, but always seeming to tarry
moments before the stage door
cracked its whine,
and laughter or bitter, adrenaline-
hot gossip tumbled for recess
and urgent annotation,
like a feast of noisy fireflies
investing the parking lot.
Proteus tarried then, humming seduction
one rhyme at a time.
To merry be and ring her in,
her bric-a-brac dowry, boxed
in cardboard and balled against the
nuzzle of greedy moths,
offered in exchange for his
code to the light-gorged language
of the lazy moon.
That so great a conspiracy,
made manifest in the roll-call
of corpses, might eclipse
the celebrants’ divisive joy,
of this she was primly, archly, aware.
And unashamed of the blood on his hands,
he looks them in the eyes and says:
Every one of your memories is wrong.
I see her now as then,
I see her trimmed in truth,
long past the strain of caring.