|
This Would be the Year |
She wants to write a love poem but she doesn’t believe in love
anymore, though their bodies lay east to west, port to starboard,
his lips reaching hers, her lips reaching back, until all there is to
do is wait for that “accident of sex, the knot untying itself to cut
them loose”. This would be the year she’d stop making promises,
because, she looses a lot of friends that way anyway. This year
they’d exchange their sad stories, her pressed up against his neck
as their boat rocks and drifts. This year she’d write, not dust upon
paper or chalk on a sidewalk; but carved in trees with sharp sticks,
like songs that stay in your head, not like pyramids that no longer
stand, or like everyone, everywhere who leaves, she’d say and
lean back in his arms, getting comfortable; remembering a promise
made from a mother to a daughter, about getting back to living life
again, but only after she finished ironing her husbands shirts. She
never did finish, and all the while her daughter watched, to see how
it was done. This would be the year she decided her lover and her
would live in spite of that legacy, would dare believe again, through
false hope, and love unrequited and veiled truths, sent in a message
she got in a dream, by a wizard, played by Lawrence Olivier, that
they would live wild, like the wind having, in the past, once slipped
by them, but not this time, oh maybe this time; and how she fears love,
but he has “un-seated her heart”, where, among September blooming
roses, he’s giving her a backrub, and he has no idea what he is doing.
Rough as a mechanic, dry as trampled flowers in an empty field. What
she learned about love, she learned from her mother; how to keep vases
for cut flowers that her husband never brings. Now, her lover, who came
into her life like an ox pulling his load, one who walks too slowly through
their field, is giving her a back rub, and he has no idea what he is doing.
Yes, she told herself, this would be the year, she’d finally tip all the way
back into his arms while they did a dead man’s float. She’d lie back
and listen to what the ocean tells her, as her lover’s bare fingers paw at her
as an animal would; her in the kitchen “not knowing what to say or do next.”
copyright 2008
Theresa
Antonia |
