The Stillness in the Room Was Like the Stillness in the Air

What was white is gone.The dress turning yellowin the glass case, as if brushedby pollen, in the museumthree blocks away. The sheetsin their banged-together bed.Some call it sublettingbut he calls it paradise:frying steaks in a panon Thursdays. He pulls beersfrom the hopper. Shesucks his fingers near the stove.

She sewed her fasciclesin a century of horses,a century of docks. The needlefelt like a moving road.Her eyes dilated when snakeswidowed the weeds. There was no extra light in the room,just a candle at her bedside, a key.With one thread she spindledand breathed: gardening,grafting, whitening, baking,letter writing, stitching her tome.

Beneath slanted drywall eaves,cobwebbed, in a roomthat grows grainy and then light,after a night leaf-stiffand sour as it rises from peace,she squirms in a gold cocoonwaiting for her release. Into when.Into not so far away. He sayshe doesn't believe in the mythof the dress, so she slidesto him again, plucks hairs fromthe white scarp of his upper back.

When he was a boy, before the platesof his skull fused togetherand the reptilian stem laydormant inside, waitingto secrete what it neededfor his brain to bloomaround it like a pink, imprisoningflower, he tasted the driftof powder on his mother'sbureau, and lathered the dust,and hunted for a numberor a knot of hair in her comb.

Her idea of paradise:Dutch bulbs, a hermitageon the second floor.Wax sleeves heldin her album some herbsshe picked as a girl.It's how she discovered blue:a fly on a jar's rim loweringthe sky. In the dog dusksof summer, while she squattedon her chamber pot, she thoughtmantel, mounting, mold.

Some nights he hears a birdland on the dormer, grip its tar,and rake at his false interior.Trains howl south.He sleeps in a tunneled nausea.In the morning, she combshim awake, and he throwsaway the condomwhere ants have gathered inside,runs their sheets throughthe wash, empties the trashand spritzes the air in the room.

In Joseph Cornell's boxfor her, he left evidenceof the coming fire:newsprint faces, the blazeof a dry-white magnolia. Critics say these are coordinates,not symbols, that healways offered his lovera chance to escape,but what about these bird-cagegirls, this river where a bullrises with a man's head?

Once, when he entersher from behind, she saysthey look like art.Through the window a treeforks into nine directions.Every acorn is a heartbeat.The limbs are dancers'forearms gripped in ice.In their bed he smellsrosemary oil, attar from the rose,hears a fly worry the wallsof the room's mind.

At first she didn't resistthe vines. She liked howthey muscled through summerthen withered, in winter, to bone.Up close she basked intheir green. Then she trimmedevery blossom that rivaledthe gold stripes insideher irises, and teasedback the strange syntaxof fingerholds on the brickand balustrade, their clenchings.

To whom is this dedicatedbut those ants who escapedwith his seed, crawling alongthe floor's fibers downto a hive where their queennearly glows, certain of her status,having chewed in halfall her would-be usurpers.Her antennae prod the hordeuntil they scatter again and probe,feeling out their range againfor some pap or a human crumb.

Nightly, herbs formed, skunksrubbed for shadows,and her lines were bornefrom light and whatit conquered. Somewhere,a planet turned. Somewhere else,another. On her back she feltthe quilt's weight, and whenshe heard wind in the elm'swicker she imagined her fatewould be honey sippedfrom the cup of her master's hand...