Carole Maso

Morning

Come sit in the morning garden for awhile.

Olives hang like earrings in late August.

A perpetual pageant.

A throbbing.

Come quickly.

The light in your eyes

Precious. Unexpected things.

Mardi Gras: a farewell to the flesh.

You spoke of Trieste. Of Constantinople. You pushed the curls from your face. We drank Five-Star Metaxa on the island of Crete and aspired to the state of music.

Olives hang like earrings.

A throbbing. A certain pulsing.

The villagers grew violets.

We ran through genêt and wild sage.

Labyrinth of Crete, mystery of water, home.

On this same street we practiced arias, sang sad songs, duets, received bitter news, laughed, wept.

Green, how much I want you green.

We ran through genêt and wild sage.

You are a wild one, Ava Klein.

We were working on an erotic song cycle.

He bounded up the sea-soaked steps.

She sang like an angel. Her breast rose and fell with each breath.

Night jasmine. Already?

On this slowly moving couchette.

Not yet.

Tell me everything that you want.

Wake up, Ava Klein. Turn over on your side. Your right arm, please.

Tell me everything you'd like me to-your hand there, slowly.

Pollo alla Diavola. A chicken opened flat. Marinated in olive oil, lemon juice. On a grill. A Roman specialty.

Up close you are like a statue.

After all the dolci-the nougat, candied oranges and lemon peel, ginger and burnt almonds, anisette-my sweet . . .after walnut biscotti and lovemaking, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo .... Francesco, what was conspiring against us, even then?

This same comer I now turn in bright light, in heat and in some fear, I once turned in snow and the mind calls that up reminded of- The way you looked that night, on your knees.

Reminded of: a simple game of Hide and Seek. Afterwards a large fire.

Sundays are always so peaceful here.

A child in a tree.

August.

I dream of you and Louise and the giant poodle, Lily, and the beach.

But it is not of course that summer anymore.

August. They sit together on a lawn in New York State in last light - bent, but only slightly.

Come quickly, there are finches at the feeder. Let me know if you are going.

The small village. I could not stay away. My two dear friends. Always there. Arms outstretched, waiting.

A dazzle of fish.

My hand reaching for a distant, undiscovered planet.

Through water.

Where we never really felt far from the sea.

He kept drawing ladders.

We dressed as the morning star and birds.

He bows his head in shadow. He turns gentle with one touch. In the Café Pourquoi Pas, in the Café de Rien, in the Café Tout Va Bien where we seemed to live then.

We were living a sort of Café life.

Let me describe my life here.

You can't believe the fruit!

I'd like to imagine there was music.

Pains in the joints. Dizziness. Some pain.

A certain pulsing.

She's very pregnant.

I'd like to imagine there was music in the background.

And that you sang.

What is offhand, overheard. Bits of remembered things.

Morning. And the nurses, now. Good morning, Ava Klein.

Ava Klein, Francesco says, helping me on with my feather head-dress.

Brazil, 1988; Venice, 1976; Quebec, 1980.

Determined to reshape the world according to the dictates of desire-

Where we dressed as the planets and danced.

Spinning. To you-

Charmed, enchanted land.

Chinatown. A favorite Chinese restaurant. The way he held my hand. As if it were a polished stone. Steam and ginger. News that the actress you most wanted had agreed to the part and financing had come. On the street, rain, a yellow taxi cab. I love you.

He bounded up the sea-soaked steps.

Music moves in me. Shapes I've needed to complete. Listen, listen hard.

It's cool at this hour-moming. How is it that I am back here again, watering and watering the gardens?

And you are magically here somehow. A heartbeat away.

We have a curious way, however, of being dependent on unexpected things, and among these are the unexpected transformations of

Poetry.

And he is here in front of me asking, Qu'est-ce que tu bois?

Blood and seawater have identical levels of potassium, calcium and magnesium.

Wild roses and rose hips.

The rose.

Qu'est-ce que tu bois?

Summer in New York. I'm thirsty.

I say "water" in my sleep. I'm thirsty. You bring me a tall glass of water and place it by my bed.

And one is reminded of- We were driving from New York City up the Saw Mill Parkway toward the Taconic and listening to the Wanderer Symphony of Schubert on the radio. I begged you to slow down, but as slowly as you drove, we were still losing it in the static, long before it finished.

You are a rare bird.

And I had to complete it in my head.

Which is different from hearing it completed on WNYC.

Though I sang it LOUD. All the parts.

It was completing itself, in midtown Manhattan without us.

Though I knew the ending and tried to sing it LOUD, without

You are beautiful

forgetting any of the important parts.

How is this for a beginning?

There is scarcely a day that goes by that I do not think of you.

Turn over on your side.

My heart is breaking.

New York in summer.

The Bleecker Street Cinema. Monica Vitti on the rocks.

Danilo laments the U.S.A. He says we have forgotten how to be Americans.

Maria Ex Communikata gets ready for the midnight show.

The Bleecker Street Cinema closes for good. And suddenly it is clear,

We are losing.

The scales tip.

Please invoice me. Input me. Format me. Impact me.

The bullet meant for Ricardo hits Renee instead. The bullet meant for target #1 hits baby Fawn. A bullet kills Daryl, honor student.

We will go to the river. We will rent a boat.

There were flowers each day in the market in Venice.

And how your hands trembled at a gift of exquisite yellow roses, so beautiful, and pas cher, Emma.

To hear you say japonica in your British accent once more.

Tell him that you saw us.

Because the comer of Broadway and West Houston is everyone's in summer.

I think of his life. That somewhere else it was completing itself Somewhere outside my reach. Without me.

Though there was no way for me to know, unlike Schubert's Wanderer, how it was going to be played out.

Somewhere a young girl learns how to hold a pencil. She writes A.

To sing the endless variations on the themes he set up.

Thirty-five years old. Aldo.

Because the guandu, Ana julia's favorite food, when we could finally bear to use it was no longer good. Expiration date: 1989.

I might turn the comer and there will be Cha-Cha Fernández walking a Doberman pinscher.

I can see it all from here.

Rare butterflies.

Nymphets by the pool.

Danilo, working out an unemployment scam for himself Plotting a trip to Prague. Can you come?

The Prague, the Paris, the Jupiter, to name a few. Can you come?

I miss Czechoslovakia sometimes.

I'll probably never see you again.

Of course you will

I might look up and there will be the Fuji Film blimp.

Or Samuel Beckett in a tree.

They are singing low in my ear, now. In the morning garden.

He grew old roses.

So what's the war about? someone asks. In brief.

Impact me. Impact me harder.

She finds herself on her thirty-third birthday on a foreign coast with a man named Carlos.

Never stop.

He is worried the city will get better-but not for awhile, and not before it gets worse.

The man on the TV wants them to freeze his head while he is alive, and to attach his brain to another body sometime later, when they find the cure for his incurable brain tumor.

How are you Ava Klein?

What answer would you be interested in other than the truth?

Make a wish.

The blue and purple in your black hair, Carlos ....

Danilo is writing a love story where the beloved makes the mistake of not existing.

Ava Klein, you are a rare bird.

Because decidedly, I do not want to miss the grand opening scheduled for early winter, still some months away, of the new Caribbean restaurant down the block that will serve goat.

Or the cold.

Or the Beaujolais Nouveau.

And so: Monday: chemotherapy. Tuesday: reiki. Wednesday: acupuncture. Thursday: visualization. Friday: experimental potions, numbers one through twelve. Monday: chemotherapy.

This room. White curtains to the floor. Wide pine panels. Painted white. Like the room in a dream.

The iris, Marie-Claude, like you, so glowing and grave. Thank you for the tiger lilies.

In an attempt between 1968 and 1970 to fashion a perfectly round sphere, he made three thousand balls of mud, all unsuccessful;

I wrote you fifty love letters.

She has lived to tell it. How to make the familv challah: sugar. flour. oil, kosher salt, eggs, honey.

I ran through broom and wild sage.

We took the overnight train.

You are a wild one, Ava Klein.

AFTERNOON

Café du Midi.

In the middle of the day.

Tell him that you saw us.

We walked on enchanted land together.

Carlos doing an improvised flamenco.

Offhand, overheard, remembered things. Imaginary things

What the story was-and if not the real story-well then, what the story was for me.

Rain and L'Avventura in the gray afternoon. You are beautiful.

If you find my body look for this in my shoe.

All night long they exchanged one blood for another.

And what has been left mysterious or unexplained is so because it is unknowable.

Nurses in white.

But when will we finally dance the horah?

Girl shot, three.

Maybe not this time.

A teenager who was a gunman for a crack house is charged with firing a bullet that critically wounds a three-year-old girl as she plays with her shadow on a Brooklyn sidewalk.

She was saying she was big and not to step on her.

Look in my shoe.

He paints the blue dome with clouds.

The dreaming obelisks. rotundas.

Ethyl Eichelberger, AIDS suicide, forty-five.

And there's Nabokov with a butterfly net.

Rashly, he allowed his character to die before the show had reached its end, which meant that following his own script he had to remain on the floor while his colleagues continued to act. He did not stay still for long. Suddenly Ethyl offered a posthumous accordion solo. Time permitting, he might have eaten fire or cartwheeled across the stage.

It is possible to be moved by a self-portrait of 1980 in which Mapplethorpe shows himself in women's makeup, eager and girlish and almost pubescent in the frail flatness of his/her naked upper body.

Make no apologies.

Eager and girlish and almost-

I know I am lucky if music moves me in such a way-and if it has rearranged a few chaotic cells or changed the composition of my blood . . . .But even if it hasn't-still I have been, of course, extraordinarily lucky.

A, and she repeats it: A. Letters of the alphabet. The most lovely configurations.

This is probably the last time

Let's escape this sad city a little while.

The new haircuts. What can be shaved into a human skull: clubs, hearts, herringbone, charms.

He chases me around the Roman house. A great flat-footed creature. The cats hanging on the curtains. Before spaghetti, before bed, those joyous, late afternoons.

After the hunt for fungi.

Those woods ....

That charming garden of cats and flowers and alabaster women, goddesses and the Virgin. And all your experiments. With wind chimes. Waterwheels. Part inventor. Madman.

Mortar and pestle

It's nice to sit here watering and watering the gardens.

And the way the swing swung.

Keep stirring the risotto.

Never stop.

Lunch.

Venice: In her glittering bowtie. Her man in the moon mask ....

That was me.

The pomegranate, dropping pits in luscious sticky envelopes to our laps.

Midday.

Searching for a certain lost aspect of the great poet Lorca, I found Carlos.

The Venetian blinds always closed in the blistering heat.

No, it's not possible-

All that was fluid, beautiful-

If not the bay, or the clear blue sky above it, if not blue horses, angels, then what is this fluidity I move through?

I am a Pisces, after all.

All night long they exchanged one blood for another.

Hour of death.

He dressed me in every conceivable way to suit his erotic whims. I was a shepherdess, a cardinal seated on a red cushion. A nun-of course. A young boy, of course. A woman executive from America. Francesco.

Ana Julia praying in the next room to the Virgin for a grandchild.

Flamencos. Fandangos. Deep song.

Blood-curdling screams.

Because I don't remember orgasms like that from before. My thirty-third year. A textbook case.

She finds herself on a foreign coast.

It is and is not my body.

Ava Klein, you are a textbook case.

Our child: Andalusian, Arab and Hebrew, Jew, Moor, Gypsy.

Ana Julia, amateur puppeteer and ventriloquist, puts on shows for the children with her assistants, Isabel and Milagro and Whistle.

And Carlos who wept when he first saw me because he said he had seen my death in a dream.

You are a rare bird.

A rare yet classic case.

Leave her son alone, the witch puppet says to me.

Milagro and the man named Whistle who headed Ana Julia's procession to the grave.

A little accordion solo, then?

A little posthumous accordion solo. For the end?

It's only a moment of course.

A matter of moments. This life.

As short as one of these sentences. As brief as that. But with a certain quiet beauty. As seemingly random as it all appears-there are accumulated meanings. I believe that.

Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé. The third week in November. May I live until then.

And Bandol. When it is right it is a most erotic wine-with wild truffle-like aromas and a savage primordial character.

The making of pesto in Genoa is a rite and must be done with a mortar and pestle.

And at the same time,

Ten blocks away as we are lifting the most erotic wine to our lips:

A bullet shot into the air kills a twelve-year-old girl out shopping for a summer dress and sandals with her mother.

Look for this message.

Run, says the mother.

NIGHT

Sing me a Yiddish song.

I kiss you.

Sing me a lullaby by Brahms.

You spoke once more of Trieste.

Queen of the Night.

I feel the Birdcatcher is near.

Thunder is heard.

Silver bells-for your protection.

A magic flute.

Sung in German.

I kiss you one hundred times.

On those evenings we saw forever.

The free world.

City of night.

He was always very tender with me.

I will.

A solitary night once.

A country road. A tree. Evening.

Louis and Louise and the giant poodle Lily.

In the winter do the trees still have the sensation of having leaves-though the leaves have fallen?

And I do not want to miss the cold.

Star light, star bright.

First star.

Your heart beating beneath my hand.

Make a wish.

Almost everything is yet to be written by women about their infinite and complex sexuality, their eroticism.

Ravishing, enchanting

Let me know if you are going.

Bearer of every kind of news.

What did she yeam for? What did she want? What were her hopes? Her unattainable goals?

Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three ....

What did she dream?

Who was she?

And where is she going?

How we liked so mach to go to the park. Father would do his funny walk. That made us all laugh so hard we fell in the grass. He'd call to me: Sophie, help! his arms outstretched.

Like the room in a dream.

Whisper in my heart. Tell me you are there.

Accuse me again, if you like, of overreaching.

The child learns her alphabet.

The mystery of your touch

Hovering and beautiful alphabet.

Of wanting too much.

After the masked balls, after the jokes-

I make no apologies....

Look for this in my shoe.

Snow falls on Mozart's grave tonight.

It is given. It is taken away.

Feathered and bejeweled, masked, because in Venice in 1632 the plague is over.

To be sung.

It is given back. Sometimes, it is given back.

Our passion for pasta, focaccia, and every fish in the sea.

Use a wooden pestle not to crush, but rather to push the ingredients in a circular motion against the stone which will grind them.

Bombs fell.

Children lived there.

Small paper boat.

Bolting between two subway cars in pursuit of a man who has grabbed her purse, she falls and is dragged by the moving train.

Open sea.

Her brother Paul: I do not think she will come here again. But I told my mother we had to go once.

The sound of guns is near. just once.

My sister was beautiful, he said. We are Buddhists. We believe that her spirit is alive and will have another life. I hope she will be beautiful again.

A place to collect things I don't want to forget:

Salamander. Praying mantis. Small horse. Star.

The way your hair caught the light.

So much desire.

She watches shooting stars.

Confetti. Quinz aôut.

Shortened-how can this-

Half-breathed response to your fingers, tongue.

Coming back from the place we've gone.

The tear in the curtain.

Veined ceiling.

Light.

Don't forget.

She screams.

The sea-soaked steps.

The souls being pulled out of the mouths of the dead.

By mistake-

I do not think she will come here again.

4. Sergei Nabokov (1900-1945) had, like his father, a passionate interest in music, especially

As we form our first words

Who knows where love goes?

The last movement begins with-

That night she dreamt of a shining marble city on a hill

They hid in a red village.

French baby gifts: Salt for wisdom, an egg,

The next day, exploring, she found the cemetery.

Floating world.

                                                              La Regence: 18 July
A change in light, a tilt of the head, a repositioning of legs, the introduction of clouds. Fragments of conversation. A shift in intention. The light board. The cars and vans with their fleeting alphabets. Drama of tourists. Daily drama of lovers. Music in the square....

Let me know-

He calls me with clicks and hisses.

Love, the stars are falling all around us.

I still think of you, after all this time.

The heat of July. I shall not forget. And dancing.

You held my hand.

Bemard

I do not think he will come again.

The last movement begins with a slow introduction in F# minor. There follows an allegro in A major. I intended for the high-spiritedness of this music to last throughout the movement, but I found that I was overtaken by sadness in the last few pages, and I let it stand that way.

Like a miracle in my arms.

I'm right here.

You spoke of Trieste, of Constantinople. You pushed the curls from your face. You thought of buying a hat, perhaps-it was how the days went.

I love you. Have always loved you. I have come, Ava Klein, many kilometers to tell you in person.

Careful of the intercom.

To this beautifully decorated box.

I miss the old davs at the Academy-when we were all there together.

And we sang.

Brightly colored stitched messages. So many names. A quilt too big to display now. A quilt the size of the earth soon.

Green, how much I want you green.

Aldo Santini. Cherished-

Each occasion celebrated with verve.

Find a cure.

Well, auf wiedersehen, as he said to me. Too late.

This is probably my last love letter

Find a cure.

But I remember, don't you, what it was like?

Find a cure-

How soon we become bright colors and stitches.

A few threads.

I will never see you again.

Find a cure.

One last glimpse....

Well, auf wiedersehen, as he said

His footprint in the ice.

Let me know if you are going. The nurses at their stations.

Central Park. I walked for a long time, wept bitter tears, brought you back.