| Canzone Paisley Rekdal |
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--for Kirsty MacColl O the songs you sang of Brazil, of the Amazons boiling up their rice in satellite dishes, stealing whatever men or comfort they could! For years I dreamed of turning Amazon, letting my slips and hair grow wild as flowered vines in the Amazon. Did I tell you? Once near Rio, I nearly drowned when the tide, like a lover, stole back to the Amazon, her brown lips wide and waiting. They had to pull me up before I sank for good, like you, my pale body yanked up like a tooth rotten at the root, while the sounds of the Amazon crooned in my blood. They warmed me like love. The songs you sang were always about love. The boys in the chip shops lied to you about love, slick under their Elvis haircuts, eyes sequined like the Amazon's dark amniotic waters. Them you loved, as much as the Irish who fled to New York, loving the night sounds of Christmas bells kissing the stars, men chained to Church and self-hatred who called you 'Luv,' their unwashed necks tasting of bitterroot and Love- Me-Not when you lured them down, down, down to your apartment. Even the Socialists who wouldn't go down on you, their bad skins splintering in the cold, these too you loved, teasing them into the bars where you propped them up on wood stools to demand why you weren't quite up to our standards yet, our Madonnas and Kylies, app- aratchiks of plasticity, of de-thighed loving- kindness spray painted pink. You were the London girl, flying up and over townships, backed by a flaming Amazonian 'do and Johnny Marr beat. Lonely girls, we put you up on a pedestal. You put us on the pill, crooning Are you up for disappointment? in our bedrooms packed with men's photographs and colognes. On a cold gray day, a cold gray man will do, I learned to sigh, and gathered up all signs of strangers' passing like treasures from the drowned; fragile wood ships sinking into horizons, down to the tips of their amber sails; down to me, where I lived through a voice that called up starfish and sirens, breathy songs so tearful as to drown sailors in their own beds. They said: In Mexico, she drowned in front of her two children. Isn't that sad? Frankly, I'd love a better word than sad right now. Something less drowsy and inert, something to reflect the woman you were drowning in her bathtub, clutching a martini. The Amazon's sheared off breast perhaps, or the war cries that rattled their jungle like silver spears. I'm in your eyes; I'm drowning, you purred in stereo until I could only picture the man who'd pull me under the way you could, into the male, heady registers my voice could barely reach. Here comes that man again, Kirsty, the one who can't stop killing you with his down- burst of sighs, his tooth-and-nail kisses. You with your black jack- boots and bejeweled cashmeres, mane of hair sweetly teased into powdery red, op- eratic clouds settled after the nuclear blast: what man can resist you? Not even that Insatiable Mister who's caught you (at last) into his thin arms, crying, Beloved! the way he once caught at me, adrift at sea and in love with the tug of shoals and moon. I swore no more songs for dead men or rock stars but you were the last straw, my Penthesilea calling all her Amazons to war. O my Amazon, the girls you've left are still here; like me, waving, not drowning, before the poets on their pylons, eyes fixed to the ships sailing above us in the night, mouths full of the hymns you sang of love. The world is beautiful and wrong. But the men, Kirsty. O the men. Paisley Rekdal is the author of the books A Crash of Rhinos, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and Six Girls Without Pants. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Wyoming Arts Council. |
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