Pieces of Morning
She can't help it. She tried to run down the elevator. She wanted to slip through the cracks and past all the cables and down to the cellar where no one knows that she was haunting the boy she knew as a girl. She can't help it. She can't help but grab her own hands and rub them over and over again as if she were trying to get motor oil out of her husband's best shirt. She couldn't stop shaking inside her stomach. She quaked there in the corner of the glass elevator. She quaked and cried to her own body. All she wanted to do was scream and grab him by the side of his face, call out his name, and pray that he wouldn't laugh. She wanted all this but only because she smelled the cologne of the man she used to love on the person in front of her.
Deep runs the river of emotion.
"It gets better with time." the girl in the bar said to me after she noticed I hadn't picked my head up to look at anyone in about an hour. She patted me on the shoulder and insisted that it would "get better with time".
"It only gets worse." I put my drink down and paid for hers at the same time. She whipped her head around and tried to get a glimpse of what I already knew would happen. She wanted to see for herself what would make someone feel that way. What could make someone so human and alive. What hold must she have over him? She wondered if there was someone in a bar, looking down at the floor, playing old songs in a jukebox, and thinking of her the same way. She hoped there was.
Sweet Apolonia came to the foot of me with open eyes. She had big eyes that could do no wrong in the voice of the book. In the voice of her book she was all but saved. In my paintings she hung upside down on rose bushes made of glass. She could sit there and stroke kittens out of floor boards but it made no difference to either the kitties or the wood. She had ice in her hands that was used to make wine and she would offer it to me every so often and say, "Here, I made this for you." I rolled my eyes and said "Listen child, ain't no kitten gonna make the world a better place. And ain't no wine that comes from you ever gonna quench my thirst. You can sit there and pet the trees until they call back to you with lemon drops and cotton sheets. But ain't no lover gonna take the place of a book written by a belief. "
It was aesthetic pretty in a place of black and brown. The feeling of water in the air always makes your face greasy and always making your body heavy. Heavy brown water splashing on your soul makes you notice the life that wasn't. Ugly brown putrid faucet spitting makes everything seem pretty that comes to you in white. Anything dead in white is prettier than brown and death. Anything clumsy and falling up stairs to make amends for the awkwardness that comes with dying, is a cherished encounter that captures all your stomach says about the way you live.
It was red shocks of hair turning white orchids blue. It was hot coals of lust painting ceilings with blood and God. It was a house perched in a cool field that caused the lambs to bleat their way all the way to the knife. It was your extended hand that changed the peace of a boy to the turmoil strength of a man.
And in the lap of present sat a piece of cloth made out of white linen and black rose peddles. It looked as though a window had opened and blown life together with what life could make. Woven fabric of soft made the sun seem even more trivial to where we were going.
