The Esperance Sonata
1
The indigo’s spent and palely you sprawl on his bed, your slender arms clasped to breasts, each with its soft full stop. Fruit resurrected out of earth’s agony, pomegranate from the underworld, a moment’s terse still point in the whirling disorder, you resign to the morning’s chill, history’s latent heat.
The leap seconds of your wristwatch squeeze the distant yesterday through doubt’s needle, banishing necessity for a pity you can’t explain, a spilt happiness. Your lids are shut, unvarnished mouth a prone question mark. If arrival clutched fear’s return, leaving lacks the strength to depart. The rain is a repeated A flat on the sweating rooftiles.
The framed walls angle slowly into sense, lamps arch on the creak of floorboards, peeling damp plaster. Stagnant flowers await death in a vase, transparent as liquid. A melody’s flame-haze slants against you such metallic filaments, islands unmoored from the ocean-floor. Sparrows squabble in wet dust, starlings fizzing beyond the window. Refracted colours of butterfly wings drift from the unstrung revolving spheres, their harmony deeper than the kindling on your ear. Is it a primitive superstition afraid to name the mysteries that tender then resume their gifts?
Desire is a spider’s gossamer touch, the fellow traveller of desolation. The red clack of falling heels, from each leg and foot the sloughed skin of stocking. Fold and pleat of loose white dress sliding down your exact thighs, belly, arms crossed over shoulder’s slope, the flaxen hair. Discalced, walking in beauty your liquefaction without clothes.
What tacit consent broke in a wave, fingers that clutched and tore your soil and roots? Lips feeding on each other, when plunging inside you, did he see through your retina into a flickering perplexity? What was the fancy infusing his blue-bundled optic nerves at the instant of dissolution?
2
If this is repose, what’s chaos? Fragments of sentiment entangled in your throat are reminiscence, a ritual dragged through shallows. A shoulder’s shrug won’t suffice. Too sullen to forget is the fathomless languor you excavate, intervals buried by the years, what you can neither fight nor change. Between longing and despair, this gap. A tale half-told resists less than one complete. Yet, a singing chord resiles from a future that fails to surface from the swell.
The wind hammers glass panes like a phantasmal crowd, painting on gessoground verdigris glints, scattered crumbling light. A thirsty whisper weeps through your leaf-curled fingers, plucked by the fragile aerial mosaic the tears that serve these secret narratives, but can’t make anything happen. Which do you cherish most, the wistful delight forfeited, the dreary virtue gained? You invent the mutability of experience, all present suddenly in the past, its recoiling pang, and laugh at a thought illusory as weather.
You still can feel his tang detached from flamboyant dream. Exile signed in the politesse of separation, pecks on scented cheeks, perspective of blind alley, those bitter relics: gall-savour and heartburn. On the palm of hand another fortune’s map is strained from the same story you’ve lived through. Are they passages from an ordinary existence? Parallel lines across geographies that briefly meet on a summer’s lake between impasto mountains? Your drama of absences, phantoms in suspended solution, testify to what actually happens, for life lasts exactly as long as the time you’ve lost.
That’s your own scent paralysed on sheets and pillowslip. A shadow cold to his caress, now vanished but lingering in the mirror, a reflection impermanent as a ghost. When your burnt umber eyes have left, he’ll gather something clinging and fading against the dark, glimpse your prints in the human salt and dust of cluttered things. Pain frozen in architecture.
3
There’s the weightless penumbra of a photograph you never gave him. Your silhouette in a black dress retreats into other conceits of a man’s blank shards. A snatch of song he caught from your car-radio, as you started up, late into another journey. Your name, biro-written on a cassette in the glove compartment. The phone not ringing night
into day. The letters and postcards you no longer write in your large schoolgirl script, and he can’t bear to read. In every twist of defeat, his syllables formed from the flavour of your tongue will be an unhealing sadness.
When will you forget his kiss, his fossil words of semblance, like a useless reverie? You’re already nostalgic for that world, as if forty years ago, when fate was irreversible as the stars. A feast of dry bread for the starving maw, an empty room’s after-taste. Did you hallucinate him, an apparition whose hand held yours during the entire film? Do you recall the screen-memory from the flickering storm of negatives, living out in flesh what’s first imagined, compressing divided pleasures into a single breath? He calls you a fish without a tail or head, occupying the middle element, strange and
subtle, between water and air.
Yet a lonely child calls you back to herself, to arms open on public clocks, the cusp you can’t veer from, remembrance ebbing and flooding out of the visible horizon. When the door closes behind, the pavements will reclaim each step that re-treads the beat, the rhyming dance breaking time from your own feet, on the asphalt and tarmac. And always you must go. Constantly voyage across roads, pass right and left from wrong turnings and go straight from railway stations, for the silent land no chart shows is a destination you’ll never reach, even if one day you stop in that anonymous Europe of frontiers lacking countries.
4
Fissures and fractures of notes are instinct with the unspoken, the unseen particles that mime the disconsolate patience of the dying. That tight vacancy is forced by music’s gravity, sinking to brittle melancholy finish. If magnetic tides pull you towards another sleepless hour, whose destiny will you locate and misplace in those burnished seas swirling in alabaster? Disappointment might redeem what’s almost too soon at dusk, too late at daybreak, the small nothings of love. Hope is a design without action.
(Basel, Switzerland)
Page(s) 4-5
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