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I was pronounced dead at 30,000 feet. Weather report in
Chicago--Radiant! Sartre couldn't have been prouder.
Being and
Nothingness.
Quick. Embrace it all. Toujours et maintenant. A handful of petunias and
moss and gravity and nanoseconds and deals made and broken. Skin. The
veins that lead to the heart muscle and beyond. In Paris your name is
Evan. In Italy my name is Marina. What was it you said? "Shakespeare
couldn't have done it any better." While diving through the aqueduct to
the front door and out into the darkness. Stars burning a hole through
your pocket. That day like roses. Acres of red in your mother's garden
smack square in Indian summer.
Was my skin blue? Butterfly breath at the edge of my nostrils, at the
horizon of my name vanishing like spit in fire. Hair tangled like
Palomino rope. Hair tangled like something unsaid. I touch the bank that
holds the water called East River. No breath for the setting sun in my
mouth on The Other Side of the World. A horse bucks with a smile and a
cigarette. At the horizon of breath. A horse named Marvelous. A horse
named Jouissance. A horse that canters above and through and beneath and
across again and again.
Marina rode Jouissance above Venice. She rode him down the Champs
Elysees on the heels of Nazis, spurred him into the luminous Jardins du
Luxembourg, across the forehead of Evan, past the Africans sucking on
Sugar Death, into the blue and gold pages in oversized books held by
enfants napping on bamboo mats near shimmering honeycombs and lovers
kissing heliotropes and asters while old men roll silver balls across
the sand in a flicker called day in a pensee called Paris.
A blue velvet eye in Colette's window. Closes. Paint still wet on the
windowsill. And Breton aches for his profile in the mirror. Don't forget
Rimbaud and his brother van Gogh and his cousin the unknown man carrying
a poster that says Je t'aime et Toujours. Try them on like skin. Slip
into the heart of Buddha. Into the flame of evening. Into a million
voices whispering Je t'aime. Man of War crashes into the white sand of
Cinque Terra and looks away just as Marina rises above him. Someone with
no name emerges from Place d'Italie with a poster in his hand and a
photograph of himself and Qui Est Cet Homme? scribbled in red across the
face of the man with no name.
Annie sings
We have fallen from our shells to face the truth about ourselves
We have tumbled from our trees..................
A bottle of Fracas crashes to the floor and the whole world breaks into
applause. The boy looks like you. The boy looks like you. Looks like
You
Smoke rises from star allees crisscrossing your skin like rivers. You
throw a lotus saddle across the black horse's back and turn away just as
I meet your eyes. You round the bend, you don't look back, you settle
into being and
nothingness
You catch a fish with your mouth. The fish is flapping and sun yellow
and O' so happy to be in your smile. You laugh him into the curling wave
and slip through crashing to the other side of the world. You write the
book you close. We write the book you open.
A bucket of paint, a tower of color, a circus of symbols. Tag and bomb,
bomb and tag. Graffiti the hearts of all the born and unborn and those
caught between. I see the blink of gold, the crackle of deadbolt blue.
I move through this splendid. I hold still in this splendid. I fly
through. This. To you.
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