THE LADIES’ CHEMISES PLAIN
After Harry Crosby
What if the cowled brides at the séance or whatever it had been, the gathering down the stairs at Rue de Vignes 333, through the heavy mauve curtains, into the empty cockpit of the private theater, fitted for two hundred, some train mogul’s turn-of-the-century set for massive orgies, password hathor horus, had all been people you knew? she asked him afterwards in the café in out of the rain, their own wet capes thrown back against the vinyl of the booth.
He sipped his coffee and wrung one hand, if that were possible, like squeezing out a cloth of blood onto the table as what one took to be the high priest of the ceremony, who had woman’s hands, drew the black knife across the six interlaced wrists, if it were an altar and not a table at Kelly’s All-Nite Diner.
He said, And what if they had been?
That might be the answer, she replied, to the letter delivered to them yet not to them, with nothing but the six-armed seal holding shut the purple flap and the phrase printed on the card inside that was very much for them.
The ladies’ chemises plain, he mused, words from the poem that had brought them together many months ago, a dark and inside joke.
She said, On the gentlemen’s shirts with cuffs, and they both laughed like they always did, which broke the ice on the preposterously solemn evening, and he called for beers, and when they walked home arm in arm much later through the rainwashed streets they never heard that there were six hard soles echoing off the concrete towers of the city, clipping in unison past the looming Family Hotel with its incongruous statues of Ra-Horakhty with its bird head and his bride, six in unison, like a single intertwined deity.
On the lady carrying her husband’s pith helmet
On the husband carrying his wife’s fly whisk
On the portholes (the portholes are her eyes) of the bride.
OUT OF THE BLUE HOUSE
After Rilke
She heard the creak of the rusted windmill first, then made out a large object approaching, like blackfish out of deep water, which quickly squared itself to her eye as she drew close along the path, floating lightly through the wet grasses.
Spectral and sagging, the old farmhouse rose from the prairie. The Alice blue peeling from warped siding, shingle roof caved at the front, and no porch, just the brick posts where the deck had once been. The brick stoop leading up to the front hall. Condemned and cold, yet inhabited, for she could make out the guttering of light from what she knew was the kitchen, through the fallen front door past the banister and stairs, down the long corridor beyond the cellar.
The boy sat in the sweet dimness of the parlor, so far back in the sofa as to be nearly invisible. The drapes were drawn, the piano lid was up. A cup on a dusty shelf jittered as she stepped into the room, onto the oriental rug with its jungle patterns, looped ostriches and arching cypress.
She kissed him.
So you are here, she said. They were both gazing fearfully upon the piano, wondering if she would play. She did, you know, many a night, so that the tinkle of the keys sounded far across the porch and windswept grasses.
He sat still as a ghost, wide eyes glued on the hand, buoyed by the slight glint of the ring as it hovered above the keys.
-- Colin Gee is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette.
