by Sylvi(a) Temple.
The silence here is clammy, the house is motionless, as if it holds its breath – Too many memories have settled into dust; Young woman listen for the bell… Feel the world’s touch upon your skin, stumble into its arms clumsy and newborn: But the door is too wide open – and she who lives here is trespassed. The pearl is deeper than the dive, the sky is falling fast – a secret may yet be disrobed – Saturdays so full of false desire but who’s to know the rest?
Wrapped in reused paper, bound by string and sticky tape, a small untidy box is sitting on the step. A fetish, it fixes her with fear. Old man voodoo came to call and watches now, one – eyed as the cat. Deliverance it seems has been delivered like the milk;
The box is marked clearly with her name, only words are strangers and she struggles to recognize it as her own. Something shifts within her now, a slower anxiety, mercurial in her veins it unsettles the surface of things. In fear she raises empty eyes to what is left of the day – she holds her gaze long beyond the moment, melding finally and without thought into the lingering lilac clouds. And as night falls upon her like a shroud, she is lost to its arrival – only listening patiently in the blackness until this day becomes Sunday…
When the doorbell rings again it is already Monday – this time a man stands on the step aggrieved. “It will die if you don’t open it,” he says. The same untidy box moves slightly in his hand, and there it is again, that smallest noise which held her rapt attention so long in the dark. These two it seems are intimate enough to forgo smiles, she takes the forlorn gift without a word, holding it closely to her heart as if to warm it like a child. Then closing the door is gone again, with neither invitation nor adieu. Minutes pass and more before he moves away, he knows that she is not inclined to happy endings and like a fool he spares her that discomfort… Indoors again she packs a small valise fills it full of shoes and pillowslips adding little things to make it pretty – it is a nursery. A nest;
(1)
Mister I see you sit in coffee bars, only streets away from her but always world’s apart, remembering first encounters and thinking how your heart is held in hers when she speaks low. And yet it seems that even in your great void you cannot clear a space to love.
On Tuesday she sleeps long into the day, a soft and fleshy ball of breath, warm and safe in her own arms… She dreams of mango headed men and the meat of plump pink peaches, she dreams of you. In each minute a universe, she is every-weather, casting long shadows across the sunny sweep of happiness – a storm chaser. Her world is faded velvet and bejeweled. Your thoughts are filled with her and you feel dizzy – believing she is always just beyond your grasp. Not so – your reach is surely long enough. Remember as a child hoping to retrieve lost treasures, how small arms would implausibly extend and force their way through impossible constraints? Each finger willed to curl around and clasp the missing object without which life it seemed would be forever dulled… But was there not hope of victory? And was there not excitement in believing that you held the power to conquer all your limitations? So then take hold of valour mon ami, fear has stolen from us all.
On Wednesday she opens the box at last and gives the bird within it berries from her own plate, sweet and ripe and inky. The bird eats greedily but makes no other movement – it has become accustomed to restraint. Although she has made the nest for it within her bag even so it cannot be inspired to comfort or desire. Perhaps – she thinks, I must become a bird myself to tempt it into flight…
On Sunday you had driven past the house and seen your gift still left abandoned on the step. It had rained – brittle, thin rain but not enough to break the heat, which hung too heavy in the air. Even the hissing orchids lowered their heads, like Geisha wearied by its excess. You kept a quiet watch that night, slept cocooned in vinyl, stuck with a mucous fear, haunted by imaginings of shifting bones and gristle growing within your skin and you becoming some other species. When you woke to see your own reflection unaltered in the mirror you felt the repeat of disappointment. It was Monday
(2)
then, the clouds had lifted but the box remained untouched. Sadness like migraine took a hold but you acted in anger not knowing how else to feel.
When the phone rang it was already Thursday. You waited for her voice but she chose silence – allowing just the quietly insistent rise of air inflating her lungs to reassure you like a lullaby. She feels the mechanical movement of her own ribs as soft as a bat and finds comfort in their rhythm and in sharing it with you. Words sometimes too crudely fashioned from thought – their absence gives you hope as if the world might start anew. Kiss me now it says- and let it begin… But it was the time for you to speak – to extend your grasp. Instead you left the line open as did she, and later placed the telephone upon your pillow like a sleeping duck awash with watercolour dreams transmitted down the wires – and you slept.
She doesn’t rest. Instead turned vandal she tears down curtains and the blinds, throws open all the windows and the doors to welcome in the she-she moon. Deep within the deepest shadows she sets mirrors to hold it captive, until the house is cast in silver and bright as many lamps, the prisoner moon creates a false dawn… And finally the bird sings. It sings as if its heart will break with the effort to usher in a new day. The notes, stumbling jazz-like urgently from its muted beak, are making patterns in the dust. They make the breeze flicker. Laughing, beautiful and beautiful again, wrapped in the torn – down – drapery she dances to the birds tune. The moon transfixed is no longer held against its will, in all the centuries never such a sight. It cannot bear to end its shift;
But Friday is impatient to begin and in its first translucent blue – exhausted like a busy bee that’s drunk on dusty plunder, nestling in her velvet rose, she sleeps at last. And somewhere from a distant shore she watches you again bringing the box to her door and in your angry eyes see’s no reflection of herself.
Having slept through the nights opera – the silence now is your alarm call. It finds you still a ten – toed man with ten fingers also attending to the morning’s routine. You take a walk through bathroom, kitchen, hall, making coffee, cleaning teeth – (3)
awakening slowly to the day, and all the while forgetting the love – locked telephone hidden within your unmade, unkempt bed. Although it is a bright good looking day you cannot seem to find an easy fit, too much of secret night still lingers in your thoughts like the viscous scent of gardenias that opens doors to other realms.
She had taken berries from her own plate to give the bird and saw in its hunger something missing from her own as if she had forgotten. All of that Wednesday she waited, watching, hoping, for it to take hold of freedom but it could not be persuaded of its own desires. On Monday, she recalled – when he had come himself to her door, it might have begun. But he would not see how much she hoped to find his love refracted through her eyes and with that it was ended:
So it is Friday still. The sun set high in the heavens – arcs, and stretching far across the sky reaches out a hand to dusk. On the step she leaves the empty box, pulls the door closed and flies away. Time and time again I watch you sit in tears that will not declare a purpose, – and you do nothing further to explain. ‘There was a note’ is all you say, in the empty box waiting for you on the step. In it she wrote ‘I can no longer be where you are because I will no longer be where I am not’.
But though you turn your head aside, Mister it is clear to me that everything remains.