Moth Sightings

She looks so slender in that smooth black sheath, legs bandage-wrapped tight, shapely, long and oh, so smooth. Swimmer's legs, I'd assume. Tiny waist and flat stomach accentuated by that long exposed zipper running down her back. Her chest a pert medium, two round, cup-sized breasts palced just so, accompanied by the firm curve of the back and the backward angle of the arms that speaks to an athletic predisposition ofr high lung capacity and significant upper body strength but with the small-boned delicateness and slender muscled upper-body of a cat. Even her angled jaw said as much with two hazel eyes, always pertinently alert and deeply set, presenting a cool shaded appeal through which no eye shadow could be seen, and a triagnular jaw ending abruptly so as to give no attention to itself but to the mouth, full-lipped and ready.

We were to go swimming yesterday night at Carol Lake, but she said she had plans. I couldn't wait. I kept envisioning her athletic body sliding right-toe first into the liquid black water from where she sat on the dock, illuminated by the moonlight, the sleeping residences huddling up to the banks admist trees and overgrown grass such is found near lake edges. Her smooth pearlescent body glowing coolly in the moonlight, all curves and eerie white, made sensually rounder by the shadows shocked into being by the abundant moonlight. She slips in leaving only the sound of slipping. Where her body disappeared, rings undulate outwards one after another, continually being rebirthed from the center and expressing outwards through thick, surupy black coffee. The water is so still at this time of night with a surface like hot glass, all wonder and lollipop effervescence.

From where I sit among the short weeds, a bank of civilization, well-worn and well-tamped, I smell algae, cattails and the alkaline smell of grass, not recently cut. Across the lake a small white boey comes to my attention. Her head. She waves. I guess I have to go in now. The chill in the air is intimidating and I hope that the water is warmer. It is. I see her head, slick with wet black hair glide back beneath the water before her white rump, the last thing reflected by the moonlight before she disappears again, is a perfectly white round spider's egg, poised, obsequious, ready for arthropodic insemination. I imagine her body, slippery with algae and organic compounds as we tread water in the center of the lake, that grin of hers, too hard for me to keep up with. She slips out a gain, away, laughing. Her teasing in annoying. I freestyle after her toes and she laughs harder when she notices that I am unable to catch her. No win. I tread water where I am, hoping she'll come back to get me. She does. While I am waiting, I think of us in a canoe, curled up tightly against the night air, two caterpillars quickly batting a cocoon before dawn. The only view is the one of outerspace, a million lightining bugs just flung out like the offspring of rabbits after a particularly pleasant Sunday. She'll swim with me tonight. I'm sure.

250-a-day

Russo-ubero quietude. I know not what to do with you. Collective incompetente meistroso ideograph chalked out in charcoal awarness. Your eys are bark brown amber lollipops of you, cooled sap of glucose polymers, presenting a glass wall through which I can only occasionally see and hear you. I listened and you listened more. I knew not that human beings could do thus: a humano-sensitivity that thrusts me through a juicer of citirc acid limelight of 50 billion gallons and 20 mph. For you every fruitation is a meaning attempt to create more, an impression on human history that will last the stretch of time. And why not? We have what we think. We think what we have. And soemtimes, when we think thus, others think after us in a simiar fashion. Or they think we're crazy. The risks are those that the great and the insane have taken. The boundary is as subjective as who prefers Grandma's bnana cream pie to Aunt Etna's banana cream pie. It is who supports your cream pie with staunch determination that you hold and protect in your legion, and all others are enemies, destroyers of your carefully defended fleet. You, my luminary illuminated graceful metaphors beneath the spotted porchlight with highly selective cheesecloth and the sensitivity of my best friend's mimosa. Best friends are always tres sensitive. They spend time in granite caves and dance gracefully around memories of two-and-two. The pleasure we take is still there, now a group of pages only shaded by ochered-lamplight, aged, curled, biology scented and salt and earth warmed, wormed your way into my permanent memory the way I'll always remember the first time I left the sand box when I was two and ran all the way to the Stop and Shop. The sudden Neitzchean realization of self was too crushing to bear. My consiousness reformed the way raw eggs break and reform synaptic bonds over heat: more quickly that yellow ducks can fall from the sky under schizophrenic mania. I am as Daphne in your silt-soft hands of mineral cool sliding over and over and over the way a forest reclaims the salt march, unwittingly to the forest, the trees and the animals that populate it, determinately to the history of marsh-forest reclamation patterns. I decorate summer ice halls with your image, only now it is mine reflected a thousand times in cacaphony. Let's chew negativity on a sun-formed hill and feed just-torqued ice cubes to geese. I miss that awful permanence.

Thursday Night Tapas and Tamales

Spanish undulating pinata rump-whacking, she shimmies into her jaw-dropping hot rumba, the growls to which even earthquakes eveolulavulate. They turned the tables, the chandeliers, and shocked the mirrors black when they came tumbling in, met their masters, and knew not what they had done. A daring young lad swivels her close, fingers as firm and guiding around the well-thumbed viola, her back thrown into the arc de triumph over his left knee, and deftly marking the tip of the leaning tower of pisa with his lips, flings her into an arabesque, spinning galaxies into dancers with cabaret knee-high kicks and chorus mimicry alternating with the slithering ditherer of a dolled temptress of rouge and curled eyelashes all a flutter with sighs and giglgles. A rowdy bunch of philandering love-buggers throw bottoms around like hot tamales in homoerotic mischief, a slap for each one of their toasty bombas sends them scurrying into the twist and, after a shout, tumbling back into her uninhibited palms for hot bacon. Saucer-eyed and dreamy-handed they melt flan-style over each other in the snakey amigos flare of flash-in-the-pan comraderie. The room is scorching like capsacin in a white woman's mouth and men shake peanuts in hot oil as two open mouths ring on a dime with a fire aphid chorus of bad romances and twist and shouts. The flambe female fire ping-pongs itno arms and around tapping sunday-formals, and like a waterfall thrusts inhibition into the farthest reachesof alter-emptiness. She is sliced carotid artery free. Fire feeds on tree. Tree feeds on CO2. And the energy form both is unstoppable. Flung salada into the starts, he grips a warm tamale and with an axial twist of the wrist, jallolopies her free to unravel the twine and burn on her own circumnavigating grape-stomping kinesis.

Tuesday Evening Visit

It wasn't until yesterday that she recognized the owl flying overhead. They both knew it was there, but months later, it was a harpie who had not yet found a place to nest. She just thought she'd swing by on a whim. They say ghosts don't know what to do with themselves when locked in closets, so they pound and pound for days on end. Until someone chooses to hear them. He still pounds. She rang the buzzer throwing away all of her inhibitions. Screeching is heard just outside the door. The Mediterranean rolls without break or violence. It is easy to do when there are no longer any expectations. A moth moves violently in the darkness of the hall, spinning in erratic cirles in some arabesque, just moving. She tries to catch it. In the lack-light he listens to her question. His eyes follow her face, down to her watch, gold on the left wrist highlighted in the musk-hall, arms brown with hay-rides and chariot-racing. She wonders if he notices that she always dresses with him in mind. A few questions later and his tone of voice betrays his fears of future engagements. Agamemnon could not have lost more to Iphagenia. She steps away from the pire, puts on her mask, and greets the owl.

Rose 1

The day grew long, and the sky was lit a pale green. Rose looked out the window and saw a transparent reflection of herself; the bone of her cheek, the hollow under her right eye, the steep, upturned nose. She found the train ride soothing. Out the window, the world moved by, flat and endless, and her reflection ghosted through it. At 7:15 she arrived at the station. She lifted down her leather suitcase and carried it out to the platform. Now the sky was a dull grey and Rose was discouraged. It looked washed out; rain would come, and she had to hurry. She looked down at her low heels; they looked shabby and beaten, but at least her wool skirt and her blouse were neat and pressed. Her hair was tied back rather severely, revealing a hairline set far back.

She chose not to take a cab and walked the half mile to the address her sister gave her. The streets were not familiar and rose took a few wrong turns before she reached the austere brownstone—a mansion really. She hadn’t been around city people much and wasn’t certain if she looked correct. Would they see her mismatched clothes, her old shoes, and assume she knew know better?

Rose glanced once more at the slip of paper Ellen had given her. It had been folded so much that the paper felt soft as cotton now, but she could still read her sister’s neat script. The address was correct, and she was at her destination.

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.

Rose 2

After she rang the bell, she felt a shiver run through her. The silence was so absolute, and it seemed to take an age before anything happened. Rose shifted her weight, patted down her skirt, wondering if she looked presentable. Perhaps not. It had been so long since she had bought new clothes. These were old, but when she chose them out to pack, Ellen agreed that they would be acceptable.

A woman opened the door. “Yes? Hello?” It seemed to Rose as if this women were looking at something in the distance past her, rather than her. She was old, as Rose knew she would be, but her body was squared in the door and unmoving. She did not look fragile, despite her thin frame and the wispy white hair that formed a halo about her head.
Rose, after hesitating, extended her hand; “I’m Rose McGann. Ellen’s sister.”
“Yes, of course. I was expecting you. I am Mrs. Stevenson. Millicent.”
The older woman’s hand felt dry and papery, and Rose was afraid that her she was perspiring and the woman would feel it.
“Come in, please.” Mrs. Stevenson turned and walked into the ill-lit lobby. Rose followed with her suitcase in her hand.

How strange to be in a house not her own. The ceilings were high and everything smelled of wood and rosewater – like church when her mother and father would take Rose and Ellen as children. It smelled like the holy water and the old pews that creaked as you knelt or sat.

Mrs. Stevenson walked in front of Rose without turning back and without talking. The paintings and flocked wall paper were too unfamiliar, so Rose looked at the back of the older woman’s head, the stooped shoulders and craggy neck. It seemed more comforting to be looking at another person – even the back of another person – rather than the formal and expensive-looking furnishings.