Monday's Portrait

I spy X in her red boufant and dark glasses, her form wrapped deliciously in black and earth tones, flagrantly blowing smoke from violently red burlesque lips. Her uncharacteristically nonchalant left hand waves languidly. Trotsky couldn't have taken a better picture Y's black-rimmed (should have been turtle-shell rimmed glasses) throw me back into Russian nonchalantism: deep dark choclate cake laced in acidic raspberry. I embrace their matching forms, soft-bodied, darkly-hued, they stand out in this city's humid June. I lust after Y's Nobokov, hints of Eastern Europe, still heavily buried in hardened frost, even in early summer. Russian biographies, autobiographies and a tall glass of bourbon warm my summer cavern of literary memory: what may not be known is that the biography has yet to be distilled. Like a pistachio ice cream, I cannot yet determine the origins of this particular tastebud of desire, but it is unquestionably present. As elaborate and surreptitious as peeling back the thick, sticky layers of wet filo pastry, we are privy to the intimate slant on personal experience painted black iwth an unassuming but violent account of history. The Romanovs could not have left a more intriguing corpse behind. And, as ever, there is the the subtle unveiling of the author him/herself through such a writing. What caramel color is boiling up, burning us, and then hardening into sweet summer treats the moment touched? I'll pick up Trosky's autobiography tonight, and behind the flagrant facade, the clamshells'll fight.