Jagged with Love

Unearthing

7~ unearTHInG I. The wide-faced man in the coffeehouse, late into the night with his cigarette and double-shot whatever, cornered her against her notebook: Talk about a good writer, now Henry Miller is the shit, he says. He's a loser, man. Writes such beautiful stuff. He starts in: Wanna know how Igot successful with women? Later she tells Miguel of the man, she works across his back and laughs insipidly, He was reading Casanova. Miguel holds to her calves, smiles with his tongue behind his teeth. And when she dreams, fmally, against the small, raspy breaths next to her, the man's face appears, eyes too far apart and lips a shade nearing eggplant, again he speaks to her: Soyour man, he likes smart women? His cigarette burns slowly toward his hand. Next morning the slatted sun reminds her of her father's recording studio at the back of the house. Towers of compact discs, the spooled cords, delicate metal of jacks, the clicks and silences, her father's voice low and opulent across the insulated walls, citing St. John ofthe Cross and John Donne. He administered spankings there, in the studio, the sound of flat slaps fell on the floor like a linen slipped off the table. Always the dilatory lecture. Her standing with hands behind her, palming the stove-hot buttocks, hiccups deep in the folds of her throat. She first heard Bach and DeBussy in that place, the efficient trills of Noel Paul Stookey, Joan Baez, Van Morrison. We believe all in one God. II. Isn't it Somedayyet, Someday with all those old words she told herself, consoled herselfwith, the swell of them marveling up in a cloud over her head. Distract me, is what she's really saying to Miguel, let me loveyou to distraction. She could swear it isn't insipience keeps them together, the twain (ah hal) shall meet, the concurrent intelligence she is almost willing to forget (How brilliant would our children be ?). It's not dimensions ofthe body that distract, but the w~, isn't the sequence of parts, but the faction. The tongue against the teeth, how he says, Afypeople, and Peru is less a place and more a door, hot oranges and pinks of his knit hats lining the shelf, a cluster offingers against her breast, Andean lutes from the speakers and forgotten potatoes on the plate that never were, silJy Irish, from Ireland. Every russet inch rests, patinaed, in his and her lovely (what some would call) bipartition. It isn't Someday, but it's perfect, the darkness. How anyway she closes her eyes with talk of God. When the home of his mouth slips open to her, ceilings rise with a company of angels, anarchic. In light air and black air, the process of reverse osmosis, carbon filtration, ozonation: we are purified water. She realizes the voice saying You like it? and again, You like it? is hers. They laugh at detumescence. They debate ifthe plants have not grown or not grown. Pebbles in the bamboo's jar lay against each other, each ring of the young bamboo growing carefully out in S-curves. III. At the Madison Library, she reads Yeats: Whenyou are old andgr~ andfull ofsleep, and a pigeon accompanies Liszt in "Sospiro," moaning unreservedly outside the window. Its groan filters delicate and grave into her headphones and it could not matter at all the orange-rimmed eyes, 74 oil-blue body. Murmur, a little sadJy how love fled. From the 4.100 aisle a man approaches slowly, says, Haveyou been toldyou have the most am<1iJng blue ryes. He holds folders and a book, she thinks most likely he is selling something. No thankyou, she says. He nods toward her hands. Poetry. You know, I loveJack Kerouac. Before he walks away, tall man in semi-pressed clothes, he drops his number on the table. She will demarcate the use ofshadows in this poem, absentia and mythos, before she stands to stretch, crumple the man's offering into the trash. She does not mind. It is something in the rows of books, the long dusty lives of paper in this place, she is sure, the same synergy as his fIngers scraping at her jeans before dinner, the light falling sideways out of reverence for words, every movement of Rachmaninoff, Ennio Morricone. Of course a man is overwhelmed. She is only basket-full of the essentials, here, in a chamber of minds. And what happens to truly beautifol women? She thinks each man will catch his own symbiosis, she thinks each new day, received as it is, is underrated. She thinks spines should not be allowed to disintegrate. She thinks the word demarcate is probably overdoing it. IV. Every time she hears Van Morrison, she is in love. It has to do with the numinous held in his mouth, it has to do with reaching the country of her father by boat, skiff, canoe. Tonight, after reading a chapter from Eat Right For Your !ype, she feels especially fond ofBest ofVan Morrison, Vol. II. Every man must own this CD, every man must read with his knuckles on his cheek, every man must hold still when the fIrefly lands on his forearm, allowing the woman with him to cup the place and watch the yellow-green pulse on their skins. Every man must spill a little chocolate ice cream on a woman's leg, right above her knee, use his tongue to wipe it clean. Every man must let a woman quiver against him when news of tumors in her father comes over the phone. Every man must talkwith her the stars, the supergiant only visible in September, the three months when Jupiter appears before Venus, the constellation of misunderstandings left behind in love. Tonight, yes, alone for an hour, she resists lighting a candle. Instead, she takes off her clothes and reads the snatch of a psalm her mother printed on a postcard: 0 give us help against the adversary, For deliverance ~ man is in vain. Through God we shall do valiantJy, And it is God who will tread down our adversaries. In the sonorous noises of middle evening, she knows she has, by default, orchestrated years of longing a misnomer, the daughter of a woman who loved her man too much, the woman who cried before and after her fust orgasm, she thought the cock worked against the man's mind and the woman's body. She lifts his name from tongue to God. Last night, again, she laughed with Miguel inside her. v. When she hopes he is indelibly hers, it is only by means of this word hopes. When she was seven, her father was spraying for termites and the cask of poison exploded on the left side of his body. For as long as she can remember, he has not complained of the blood clots, unexplained fatty tissues, arthritis, cardialgia. For as long as she can remember, she has wanted to marry a man like her mother. Sans compliance. Sturdy patience. The clean frustration, all those soft skins of the palm. So she wears the cuirass of loving quick and loving hard, and never knowing anything about love. The wide -faced man said, I startedgetting women ~ pretending I was dumb. Only once did she take a stranger up on his haphazard offer: Tomorrow? We'llgo for a walk. She'd borrowed his dictionary, this man with a tall cup of tea, Beckett in his hands, questions in his mouth of faith and luck. Days later, she'd memorized the small mole equidistant from his chin and bottom lip, ellipses of muscle rounding his brown shoulders. 75 He would not take the sex she offered in soiled, rich handfuls. You wanted to be married, remember? She felt him hard, felt him reposition carefully away from her. His valediction meant, I'm thinking ofyou,you know. The slatted sun in the morning reminds her of her father's recording studio at the back ofthe house, sets of heavy earphones, a wire hanger squared and covered in her mother's hose in front of each microphone, the switches slidingunder herfather's fingers. He showed her his Bible in this room, margins in Proverbs, Isaiah, Ephesians where he'd written her name. The Bible's cover was collapsing, the spine a soft memory. Mary Chapin Carpenter sangthrough the end ofthe world. VI. Miguel refused to take a camera to Machu Picchu, knowing the tip was his mind's, set against the sky, the colors of hispeople sold in fragile booths along the way, his mother clucking discoveries, kneading ancestry into peripatetic moments with his sister, winding trails up and back from the fingernails of God. It was discovered in 1913, he told her, back when people still discovered things. Deep in the morning, when all the water of earth is fallen, falling, even though she hears the voice spread across the room of their bed like a thin canopy, Cover me, love, I'm cold, she does not know it. Or, at once, she knows it so completely she does not know it at all. ...