She slips out
into the night,
black sky, made omnipotent by
the high-rise gait of the
six-inch stiletto slicing down
from the heels of her red boots.
“There is another life
beneath the one you see here,”
she says, smiling, and then she
hands the bartender a tip.
She hasn’t bought a drink in
three months. Since the weather was
warm enough for short
skirts and these
high-rise boots, as if the bones of her
long legs and slender thighs hold magnets
for marrow, drawing the dollars
from their pockets and their fingers,
fumbling awkwardly, for what might
be hidden beneath her
short-sleeved, bright pink sweater.
And then, at the base of this bourbon red-orange
glow, she is Alice gone through the looking-glass,
to the other world, where she sees his hands, a
simple refraction, a reflection she knows,
carrying her over and down to questions:
What does she need, anyway, with
hands, such as these—they are
heavy hands, and dark,
filled with worn promises
to serve and protect, and they come
with warnings. Rough palms scraping
wherever they
touch, and she’d been
made threadbare by his calluses.
She slips out,
into the black back streets of a bleak midnight
and down the alley, inviting the stray cats to
clamber and creep along the wet
hard angle of where her walls touch
puddled pavement.
Unconcerned about the riff and the
raff that will sniff behind her or the homeless
man snuggled up to the slender brown bag cupping his
bottle of mercy. Cardboard spilling over; the dumpster
is a dim, green hulk she skirts and milk crates
cuddle together, castaways from the grocery.
It can’t end that way—with some
tragic amputation of
the illusion—the violent death
of this particular delusion.
Instead, on the other side,
it will end beneath the guise
of his slow smile, lighting a face that is half-moon,
innocent, weary angel, beautiful. Ethereal, blue-eyed and
mysterious. He is her magic hour (unfathomable),
the guardian of her
watchtower; the one who minds the lighthouse,
the watershed, with his
large hands, set just so, the way they’ve
folded themselves, delicate, like butterfly wings spread
thin over yellowed parchment,
but through the looking-glass, in
the long ago, or the before time, she recalls
the way the shadows of others fluttered
around her heart before tightening down
into cold cocoons. It was the death of her,
in slow motion, and she can’t recall
if it will come in the way that darkness comes,
glancing sideways before prodding with the end of a
lit cigarette. The way the little red twist of fire
pierces the flesh right below the flat plains of
her stomach and puckers there
where she can still smell the skin burning.
Or it could come in the way a man draws back, and pushes
forward, until the air is suddenly gone, and she will
see, first, little black pinpoints of light and
then stars enough to fill the heavens of her
wide, brown eyes.
What is this,
really? Just a collection of hard angles
and bones that line up in the sharp points of
peach knuckles. Thoughts, only, made of muscle, and tendon, and
bent over, lurching and feeding on weakness, drinking
in the fear she bleeds onto sheets, and carpets, and
sidewalks—sometimes empty streets, or the backseat of
a rusted Chevy. They are the engine that
stalls. The ghost of sorrow. The things
she knew from before and also the things
unknown, these constructs littering barstools like mushrooms
sprouting in the loose body of dead soil.
She slips out, at first, unable to divide
the god from the devil—that which kisses
her, lightly, on the forehead, or the shadows
that shove her, nose first, into the pillow—
this bleak, cloudless veil between sleep
and waking, fading, she hears the steady pulse of her
heel on the concrete, sees the long, graceful
arch of her shadow trailing the brick, tracing out the
slow bounce, the seductive roll of her hips—sister self, the one
who is large, black Oshun, mother goddess
with her yellow robe slipping into the river.
In prayer, there, where the silence rests
like a cool cloth to fevered flesh,
she is swept toward the bosom of “a time
to come” where she will be
invincible, high-rising, surrendered
to the wild-galloping
heart-stallion.
04.12.09
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