KS Culbreth

Revival

Inside a visionary, ballads sung in another decade invoke the same cold-water-flat image as they did then. Writhing together, we moan to be born. A flash of the moonlight, some misplaced summer moonlight leaking through the drapes of the borrowed room, the hanging drapes coarse and stiff beside our rhythm and undulating feline spines, scintillates in the moisture on the back of your thigh and reflects my face as I pore over you, now asleep, me now crushing half a cigarette into a clean copper ashtray greening.

Through the cracked window, the irony of the breeze that lifts and lets fall the long, light hair from your head, that curls carelessly across your back and shoulders is mockery, mockery as cruel as the end of the record retracking the needle over and over in the empty space where there is no music only ticking silence repeated with monotonous reliability that defines for us…that reminds us…that reminds us – that music is the space between notes, poetry the effect of certain words after the reading.

That for the briefest flash I hear my mother’s voice rebuking me is no coincidence after such irony, and that you hold me between your flesh like a vision of guilt cast upon me by countless I told you so’s now takes its toll as I nearly forget us even while imprinting you upon my memory, recalling the decimation of my family, carried away by self-concern and living themes of survival and extreme comfort. I must face my private and sirenic fantasy, must point my chin heavenward to lend my eyes a sight less tangible but two millennia more true.

Though the unshaded lamps may be too harsh, the shadows of the occasionally heaving curtains dance like their joyful children and they stretch and arch and twist along the wall as we did in our first passion. Beside me for a moment you stir but do not roll over.

I press my face against your back feeling for a pulse but, feeling none, lose touch with the sirens, against the draught my cold ear like death in back rooms (the vicar lies with laced fingers) warmed by glistening flesh that, after all the dancing at the club and all our dancing since then, still smells of lavender soap. In the fragrance I can see the small shell-shaped soap that was in an old Wedgwood dish in my grandmother’s guest bathroom, unused for fifteen years, touched occasionally only by my wet finger cautiously stroking its underside to release its secret aroma.

Your hair is long, I should note, and still retains its own natural and peculiar hue, a hue that one day shall fade like browning leaves and fall beneath the shears when you decide it is time to trim the sails. (Yes, in the nimbus of the street lamp I see an image of you gesturing toward me, an uncertain gesture I tried to disregard or deny.)

I’d crush you to embrace you as I feel, I whisper to your back as you sleep and I lie beside you lifting your long auburn hair and letting it fall. Flashing back, I mount you with the hallway light of two decades ago placing a rhomboid across the doorway bringing to mind being the first to bed amid the sounds of evening in the country while in the den the adults’ voices discussed adult matters, muttering which children would go with whom, sensing I was being discussed, long, long ago.

Inside I search that belly-warmth found one spring after such a night and waking from a noontime slumber, belly-down. The sheets were white and clean and cool, though outside a threat of heat arose. I lay there for some time sensing bloom and breeze, knowing all were young and strong and would live, would live, that for two decades I could slumber safely. Though only a child, the spring noon was already trite, though no less precious, and a new sensation arose. I noticed and adored it and tried to capture it as it disappeared, a vapor that could not be touched, a sensation from whence began the search I undertook tonight, every night like this.

But even then I knew that some Christmas would find my grandma dead and would never be the same. I ran into the living room and grabbed my mother’s arm while she rocked in that floralprint rocker, explaining – I can’t describe it, but I don’t feel like myself. Even as I am remembering, I forget. She held me in her lap and pressed my head against her breast, rocking, rocking. She patted my head and told me that whenever I feel this way I should go to her and she would hold and rock me.

Memory is not unlike sunburn with its maddening sensitivity that makes you aware of even the slightest breeze and you beg to be numb, to forget the pain, but the burn itself constantly reminds you, and you cannot forget the sun.

I was taught early that we are all imperfect, that we are imperfect because we are ungodly, that everything we do is impure because it is imperfect, even the good we do. Every moment of our lives is a continual falling from grace. So much guilt overtook me at such a young age that eventually, in order to survive, I had to cauterize my memory. What I did not know was that this would anaesthetize my spirit.

I don’t know what happened exactly. But I do know what caused it and the effect it’s had. They kept beating that drum about being impure…beating that drum and beating it, until one night, something like a dried flower crumbled inside. I slept and when I awoke, I simply could not remember the wrongs I’d done. Try as I did – for I did not want to forget – I could remember nothing of my wrongs.

I suppose the torment is similar to senility. I am aware enough to know that I’ve forgotten much of my life, but I cannot remember what it is that I’ve forgotten. Until the night comes, for that is when I set out to be impure. As tonight, it is only when I abandon all pretense of purity that my entire life of wrongs passes before my eyes and I find in that the nature of glory.

As I emerged from childhood to where I am, not having the remembrance of my past, I was forced to weigh each new moment as an isolated event, not as that continuum of moments each compared and contrasted to, caused and judged by all that precedes, that continuum that is each of our lives.

Without a past to be recalled as a kind of gauge, I could only judge each moment as a violation of someone’s or some god’s standards. Thus I began to forget even the good that I’d done. All my life became the essence of a bad dream forgotten but the fear of that dream lingering on through the day.

What virtue and enlightenment is there in only acknowledging what all the world would praise? There is none, only a hiding of ourselves from ourselves, which is nothing less than deceit and of the worst kind for our souls.

Night comes and I set out so that I can remember and glory in that remembrance for then I am whole. But by dawn, I forget even what I had done the night before.

How then can I capture a moment in my grasp to set it free when it is never, the vapor never? I whisper. These are the days I seek to capture, to remember later; this moment with you is the belly-warmth I never want to fade. Moments slip from bad to worse and with each slip we glorify that which was just lost. Yet here, on nights like this when I no longer deny, when I accept my impurity, that I can feel again, sense and memorize intensely, that all my memory comes rushing back in perfect clarity. It is only afterward in unwanted but trained regret that the forgetting begins.

Even now, still too young for my poetry to deem me wise, I look upon the dead, those taken from me, from me alone it seems, and wander back and through the fields where we in idle revelry bided our days and recognize that the past can only be forlorn, even its fondest, most cherished elements, for any distance between a desired taste and the tongue intensifies the craving. And how I crave even just a sip of my virginal past.

You lie there with your straight hair blackening as the room grows dimmer – your hair, perfectly manipulated to look lightly disheveled, cut with a razor dulled against a porcelain sink. The black mascara like streams and moats at midnight gather up your yawned tears while I talk softly exhaling spent smoke. But you look up to me with those alluring slits admitting light to a stoned soul and tell me to talk poetically. Fine, then.

“Your worldliness is the very embodiment of supreme innocence.”

“No, more poetic.”

And with a whisper I ask myself what could be more poetic than innocence, since is not the effect of all poetry a fantastic remembrance of what was once but is no longer, the comparison of what we were before a poem and what we became after the reading?

“All that is of no consequence, for innocence is ignorance though you do so well what you do. There is no innocence in our collision, in the confluence of our blood. I never pretended that there was.”

“Stop babbling,” you say piercing your fingers into my hair and pulling it away from my eyes.

“Only brooks babble but thy watery eyes are little more than runoff freshets trickling o’er thy cheeks to stain my breast with brackish waters. If I could hold you but a lifetime, I would not so fear the rising sun.”

“Hmm,” you say in a moan that becomes a yawn.

The mascara-tainted river slides along your temple as you drift into that theater where we go to escape or to view the drama of latent neuroses.

I’d crush you to hold you as I could, my mysterious china doll. Though you say I babble, you comprehend the recitation, the lyrics of a dead language, of the moon which reflects the glowing of our hearts and its pagan rituals, of the earth and our bodies who reside here just long enough for our souls to find their eternal companions.

I’d smother you to kiss you for the taste I crave. I part the cretonne drapes, loaded with the odor of stale cigarette smoke, and I am etherealized by the perfume that sifts through your hair and hovers over your bare shoulders, snow-capped mountains peaking from the sheets. The brilliant, now confused face of the moon makes sparkle the moisture on my lips and lashes. From the apartment downstairs folk music played two decades ago once again commands the stage. In the ebb of black across your temple I drag a fingertip and smear it beneath my brow, retreating these brooding eyes to an even greater darkness.

You awaken after an hour and the revival begins again.

“Why haven’t you slept,” you ask rubbing your eyes then draping one lithe arm around my neck.

I answer exhaling smoke into the chilly air that when I am able to remember there is not enough time for sleep. How like a sadistic jailer God is to give us so short a life and then to reduce by a third the time that our disunited souls may seek one another. If only were I a child so that I could lose myself within the forest of your hair. In the settling darkness, the thick eye liner makes almonds of your eyes.

In the summer of my adolescence only letters written with weak pens connected me to the outside world, the world beyond the prison of safety and security, hell to a Romantic heart aching for deserted highways and ice covered towns of the north country, where the streets are muddy, the liquor straight, and pasty, powdered whores do not abhor their profession. My queen, you stir and I lay myself across you as you stretch and smile.

In a moment I am one with the winter of another decade, a winter when poems were scratched out in retrospect of a horrid fight with a lover’s family. With each more desperate breath I try to reclaim a vitality that I envision within you. The city is frozen, but within you I feel a candle, a torch at the end of a strong wrist like a beacon in the too-cloudy, foggy night. Your eyes fully peel like Morning Glories to the sun as I try to name you but cannot. But to you it does not matter that I cannot, only that your vitality is shared.

I replace your face with that of the girl next door, the first I kissed, in secrecy, in my mother’s room, with her older brother in the den asking my older brother where we were. I would stand beside her asking for one more kiss. Our lips would press tightly together. We were merely children, yet our souls had begun that ageless search. We clung to each other until we heard her brother charging through the living room acting as though he were concerned about her but really using the situation as another opportunity to bully us.

You smile at the stream of memory you’d heard rumors of at the dance club. Your slight overbite peaks beneath your plum-colored lips, curling back into a sliver of a smile.

“My voice was hoarse in the early morning after a long night of drinking as David and I headed back home through the field that splits the two developments. I was in front of him as we walked the narrow, snaking trail, and I noticed he had not said anything humorous for a couple of minutes, which was unlike him, and when I looked over my shoulder I saw that he had exposed himself, still following me on the trail but fully exposed beneath an impassive expression, as though it were only a query which I, by turning my interest back to the trail, refused to answer. When he was uncharacteristically serious and silent over the next hour, as his mother prepared us breakfast and his father, wearing nothing under his bath robe, read the paper at the table, I suspected it was not merely a query.”

Even when you moan, you do so now with Sandra’s voice, now with Lynn’s intentions, though it is David that I throw into the lockers when he jeers me for his friends. In the art room I tantrum throwing bottles of tempera paint against the walls while the teacher looks on appearing less concerned but leaning back in his chair sagacious, eons wiser than those who cower. He leaves the walls splattered for months, and, when inquired about the mess, answers that it is art and only washes them when forced to by the administration.

A frozen sea of chrome beneath the ledge is less impenetrable and the inanimateness of its swordlike gleam less prohibitive than the coming resistance of guilt that pushes me from you to the far side of the bed, the memory of your name already a confusion of similitude. And I am not surprised when I finally notice the tears that have again filled your eyes while I like a mountain stand by and count the change of seasons I assume I will never share with you. But it is when your eyes overflow with tears that I first fear my father may have been correct when he prophesied the emptiness of seasons for those of the vagrant’s heart; it is when you try to pretend that they are the tears of a yawn and try to hide the blackened puddles by draping your arm over your face that guilt first kicks hard within my conscience.

For I know that the old Baptist church on Chestnut converted into a decadent dance club where we met tonight at the bar beneath the clock with hands spinning quickly backwards and the tremendous speakers casting darker lyrics of love and betrayal than hell has ever written through the faithless, will one day crumble as if the target of great bombs. That when we wake and part tomorrow you will mention me casually to your friends as uncertain about many things but that I spoke poetically throughout the night, does not sadden me.

I know that one day when we are far, far removed from this night and from one another by many decades, you will have found perhaps a truer love, a greater warmth than that between us when we cuddle, two spoons curving perfectly together. But I know by the moon, its pale light in the traces of snow, the whipping of the steam from the grates, by the distant sound of motor and wheel, the sound of a door closing and one scream of laughter down the block, by the one moment of fear, that before you will I stand when you kiss your truer love, whenever you doff your turtleneck for him; when you dance for him he will house my eyes and cause your moves to flow toward me. Forever will I be your history, as you will be mine, for tonight in the breath of life we sustain the life of history. I can only pray your lifetime lover will not hate me for the perjury of my implied commitment, for I was dying without something real, something alive, though I suspect he should.

The generations after us will see in the water of our eyes the vague phantoms of our dance tonight. And they will wonder about a hasty and reckless youth when we risked (or did we dare) fatal and incurable diseases to share in each others lives, to record like a carefully collaborated history the days of our imported liqueurs, imported dance and dress, of our domestic fears, of snowy walks beneath bright street lamps that illumed our halos while casting shadows at our feet (as though there were really a difference between the two), you clinging desperately to my arm. But that one day your Bartholin’s gland will shut down like the vanquished steel mills along the river, mills that could not compete with younger and stronger elements – this slows the beat of my heart.

That one day I will not know the commanding impulse that drove me across the dance floor, in a room darker than the closet from which comes this breviary, to ask you while discreetly displaying my straight razor whether you needed a blade, is sincerely saddening. I wiped the ethereal snow from the tip of your nose and rubbed it into my gums. And leaning back into the pew against the wall, you smiled as dreamily then as you do now, receiving each of my thrusts. I will not know the drive, will only recall these days, when every option is laid out before us and we complain that we must choose rather than claim the many. How much black will we wear in those days? My hair may be too thin to tease, may not hang long enough to point across my eyes.

As we feel life falsely created between us, a universe made by the hands of Man and destroyed by our medicine, I feel that belly-warmth that captures this moment despite your impending regret. I lay across you capturing yesterday, this evening, and tonight in a most supreme reality, a total recall not to be remembered, but to be relived to replace an unwanted solitude with these precious hours. I long to recite your name as an immortal poem in the silence and seclusion of my pitiful flat, to my pale dancing shadow cast by a single, swaying light bulb on the one white wall of regret, a whispered recital of immortal poetry, trying to recapture an immortal poetry pulsing through me tonight, a poetry that expresses itself to your half-listening ears…Marlena… Marlena. But you interrupt me by taking me gently in your hands and kneading me like an expert potter molding with divine inspiration.

—–

When I approached you, I presumed that you could not understand what I intended, that being caught in the escape of mock depravity that is often the escape from severe stagnation, that being bound by petty goals and momentary thrills prevented you from looking out beyond the strands of your accidental bangs. The few lines we spoke, as black lights made our teeth a brilliant phosphorescence, formed a brief conversation conveyed more by the shape of our lips than by the sound of our words since the chthonian voice of the bass in harmonious battle with the angelic whispering of the cathedral organ drowned our voices imposingly (though earlier we each sought the Lethian drowning of its slow and melancholy melody). That music, even now this many hours later, rings in my ears as though I am trapped in a kettle drum and every second is a fist that pounds on its skin.

I pull your perfect form against me again and, in order to understand why you have affected me to a distraction that will not let me rest, I retrace every moment of the night that led to this, reinterpret all that you said and the seemingly irrelevant events, such as the way you coolly motioned me to spin around to better judge my baggy pants and cardigan, which I did only to find you looking not at my clothes but just over my head as though there were a cloud around me and you were trying to determine its color. I wonder for a moment if perhaps being overly sensitive may blind me to the perceptions and impressions of others.

“I have an edge, just like everyone,” you answered my offer and sipped from a bright blue drink.

“Ah yes,” I said forcing myself between you and your girlfriend dressed in rainbow colors who found no humor in my deliberate rudeness, “but how many of us lay out our wrists?” I asked exposing mine to you, “How many of us will take that risk?”

Of course, the eyes capture more than reflected light, as the voice carries more than words. For a moment with my wrists above your lap you scanned me for hazard and, finding only mockery, you closed my wrists together and pushed them down between us. I need not strain to recall the lambskin softness of your hands, only slightly chapped by the dry winter air.

She’s a regular, I thought as we watched the floor of dancers each dancing by themselves, each tapping a different nerve through the synthesized neo-Gothic canons, the seat is worn to her curves. Though she is with her friends, she is alone.

A boy was slapped on the cheek by his lover for posing in front of a group of wallflowers as he danced. You smiled soon after I, though your friends shook their heads collectively. I left you to your friends asking you to wait, please wait and seek me out tonight when you leave.

While returning to the pew on the wall across from yours, I placed each step atop a pair of burnished ruts left by a row of kneelers from one of the denominations that served in this church over a century ago. As I wondered what made a house one day God’s and the next day man’s, I strayed into the faint artificial light cast from a stained-glass window built into an interior wall and lit from behind by an artificial light.

Before me lay the amber hue of Mary, surrounded by saints and angels and serpents, her son upon her lap, her arms turned out as though an offering of acceptance or only an offering. I paused trying to conjure up the piety that overwhelmed me to shivers each Christmas Eve of my childhood, but could not. Checked from behind by a slam dancer, I lurched forward and climbed upon the pew to keep from falling.

“Are we abandoned if we let our wrongs possess us?” I asked her.

She did not answer. I turned and saw my shadow on the floor blotting out the hues of the stained glass.

As the steep steps leading down from the club filled with the dizzy throng at closing, I waited at the bottom of the steps to see if you would look for me as I had asked you to do, and if you would, whether your desire would appear the same as mine. As a light fog settled on the chilly night, steam arose more fiercely from the gratings.

You were arm in arm with a tall and rubbery young man with spiked blonde hair, a turn of events I had not considered and that nearly offended me. Rather than avoid the discomfort of rejection by turning and hurrying away, I thought one of us might as well have a perfect night and decided to let you fully gloat in the satisfaction of your selection.

I watched you closely, a pained expression beneath my knitted brows, as earlier no display of hazard, but of a mockery. Then you pointed to me, and the two of you approached, he with a big smile, holding out his hand, palm down, delicately. You introduced us, and we exchanged pleasantries. The two of you set tentative dates with one another concluding a conversation you had begun earlier. Like a father with a wink of approval, then, he smiled and removed your arm from his and placed it with mine. He would be staying at a friend’s for the night and, most trustingly, he pushed a spare key to his apartment deep into my pocket.

—–

I scan the room and photograph every detail of it, my spirit now a palimpsest of negatives. His room is in a very old building with high ceilings and the solid, fancy moldings from the turn of the century. It has a fireplace which has been blocked off. The room is heated by tremendous radiators. Exposed water pipes run from floor to ceiling. Although it was built at the turn of the century, it is altogether very plain and is scantily furnished with distressed antiques – an armoire painted robin’s egg blue that has become pale and worn, a library desk against one wall, a small mahogany bookcase, a dresser on top of which is an art deco vanity set and a shaving mirror, and this bed of wrought iron. In the attached bathroom, an old sink with two faucets and a rubber stopper is stacked with soap, wash cloths, colognes and hair gels. As I look around, I remember the wink and smile as he pushed his key into my pocket, and I wonder how many would appreciate his trust, his precious tenderness and unselfish sensitivity that allowed us this night.

A crescent of bright fire, like a waking bloodshot eye, spreads across the rooftops. As alarms, both internal and external, begin to rouse most sleepers to their perfunctory days, I begin to drowse. I dream a quasi-dream in which you are a modern Hero and I swim to you through a thronging sea of idle people, milling about, turning and moving in one direction, then turning and moving in another direction. You stand cloaked, your fingertips dripping blood, your wrists slashed. Through the deafening dirge you clearly whisper, Why, why? And now the guilt is fully mine.

As morning light flows over the sill replacing the breeze that crept through earlier, as the light shines bright on the blackened bars of the bed, I prepare to forget our kissing of only an hour ago.

But I do not forget.

After many slow minutes I expect to forget the late night.

But I do not.

When enough of the dawn has risen that I should have forgotten all night and its preamble evening, I still remember every detail.

I stroke your head with a gratitude I have never known. The light brings out a crimson in the auburn of your hair, the amaranth of your plum-colored lips. I chide myself secretly for the pity that leaks from my heart and poisons my nerve to forget as I have always forgotten, for I no longer want to regret, no longer seek forgetfulness. And I see as clearly as the drifting steam crystallized by the rising sun that it is because of you. That there is a rarity in you that creates between us a clarity and truthfulness, a love that fully aware of every wrong forgives each.

I kiss your lips several times until your lipstick is paler than it was and caress you deliberately enough to awaken you.

Knowing that we may well be turned out of your friend’s apartment shortly, I do not wait for you to greet the morn with an embracing stretch and yawn. Within minutes you are full awake and the moisture between us in the morning light saberglints as did the moon in the tears on your lashes. Dusk becomes dawn becomes dusk becomes…I recall the chain back to boyhood.

When your face becomes mine – this distracts me greater than the others I have seen tonight, and I am uneasy kissing my own reflection. But I persist despite my own objections. Since that spring when I found that first belly-warmth, and through those letters where I cultivated a voice that did not seem to be mine, since I first felt the pang of sensitivity I have always halted before the narcissus considering those flowers the best of spring. But I was wrong; the best of spring is the full completion of the cycle. I turn toward the window and see that the coming sun silhouettes the gushing clouds of steam pouring forth from distant smoke stacks. And despite the chilly draught, I feel for the first time that belly-warmth I first found as a child.

“It is as cold as winter should be,” I say looking down at you but seeing only myself. “How can I feel this warm?”

To fill the emptiness, the emptiness of an undirected love, the ideal of which I once praised as more real and lasting than mortal bonds. I collapse, the sympathy unfinished and, breathing rapidly, rest my chin against your collar.

When I lift my head again, your beauty is as angelic as it was beneath the black lights. Suddenly it is you before me and not my own…what? creation? And for a moment I dared to love you as I could no other, as though this were some cosmic chance, that rare instance of the ideal becoming the real.

Though only a sparking fancy, you sense a subtle shift in my demeanor, in my intent, perhaps. You maneuver yourself to fit better beneath me, enshrouding me, enfolding me, your fingers combing through my dampened head. Then you embrace me until your nails draw pale red lines on my back. As I lift away from you, you smile with that slight overbite and trace the edges of my lips with your soft fingers.

“Hyacinth,” you whisper. “Your lips took some hyacinth from my lipstick.”

Again, I cite your name as that timeless, universal poetry… Marlena… Marlena, but I begin to wonder if, against my most sincere intentions, my words sound as shallow as anybody’s. But before I can create for you the poetry you went seeking tonight, you interrupt me.

“Won’t you say something that makes sense?”

And I almost say, Couldn’t we spend our lives together, for if we did, wouldn’t it always be as tonight? How perfect and unlike any other night in my loveless life. Couldn’t we just change our lives so that we would be together?

“Your life, as mine…mock squalor and filth, made-up grunge and pain, as mine has been, but truly decadent and dark, mourning the absence of that which makes alive the merely living…” I begin to say. But I realize before it is too late that my even attempting to reform the inevitable could condemn me to the hell of living another fate of my own creation, as I alone created the lovelessness I have been living.

“…how cruel, how cruel, that we only have one life, one history to live. Even to give one life to love is not enough. For I have the love of no less than ten lives. And the old, the crippled old, what do they remember? With what intensity? What have they forgotten? How I adore them, the instability, shortened days and growing weakness that mark a life fully lived, living histories of the world but frequently without the voice to convey. Or is it that they merely lack an audience.

“You’re still drunk, aren’t you?” you ask. “Won’t you say something poetic…that makes sense?” You say this with a fading voice and closing those damp lashes and finally bringing forth from my eyes tears that drip onto your plum lips. Into the angel wings of your smile melts the amaranth. You pull my head down and hold it against your breast knowing that some things can be so simple that they are overwhelming.

“It would crush us to love you as I feel I could…”

“So sweet, so sweet.” You pull away to focus more clearly. “Strange,” you say, “that my lipstick Amaranth becomes on you Hyacinth.”

There is the cycle of seasons we can never overcome or replace and each of our bodies a single bloom that withers and falls. It is overcome by the awareness of our withering that we cannot see that every bloom is driven through an immortal vine that spans all seasons, all generations.

“Perhaps I have sought too long within an answer that dwells elsewhere,” I say to you. I turn from the window and bury my face in your sweet and mysterious hair, tasting the tangy remnants of your perfume, and press my lips close to your ear. There is the sound of a key jiggling a loose lock.

Marlena… Marlena, this need not ever end. To love you so after only a night is not so very wrong, is not implausible. With a sheet over us, I reach my arms around you as if with a fatalistic intention. Marlena, this need not ever end. I remember all the years so clearly now and need not forget but fear that I will should you disappear. Marlena, this need not ever end…

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance or similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. The author bears no responsibility for any damages that may occur to actual persons based upon this writing.]