FLIRT

6 1 R F L I R T C H R I S T I N A P U G H The bank of cloud that night was like a smoother lamb’s wool, a fistful you’d pull to stu√ a pointe shoe for ballet class. Or maybe the cloud bank was more like the tiny cotton coverlet in a costume jewelry gift box–the rough-cut layer you lift to reveal the ring. But rather than acting inert like jewels, the stars began to flee right under and over the opacity, conserving a certain dialect of flirt – almost the way Haider Ackermann draped some spider web-ish filaments across his model’s face and then fastened them with safety pins all along the girl’s smoothly alternating thatches of white and fuchsia hair. When photographed from behind the scenes, the model looked bushed, I have to say. Still, it was a privilege: she passed for a ghost orchid. A syrinx, with strings. This was on a Trocadero runway in Paris, circa 2015 – after the super blood moon made its last earthly visit until 2033. It was not exactly bloody, but La terre est bleue comme une orange, as Eluard would say. In this case, skies were black as an orange, or a peach moon harboring illegible, gray characters south of the huge, pale, scrolled cotton cloud curl when I sat beside my husband and my friend, the three of us staring at the sky charade with all our legs pressed against the white rocks bordering Lake Michigan, and half our neighbors there too, with telescopes and phones. Don’t you 6 2 Y think the word beside says more about love than almost anything else could? And safety pins? They’re ammonite fossils of punk bands, strewn throughout the landscape in our thrilling, torn debris. So I’ll have to stay here and make much ado. About everything. ...