Читать книгу Visiting Hours at the Color Line - Ed Pavlic - Страница 14

All American Erotica : A .38 Slug in My Vocal Chords and the One That Got Away

You say I wear a sleepy-eyed mask

on my back. There were two shots, one clean

out the front; one a slow burn in my open

throat. We’ve come

a long way, learned to arrive

at airports early, the easiest shirt to wear,

the quickest story.

At home, tonight, the blinds

cut the light, the amber bottle in your hand.

You’re in the corner of my eye, proof that it’s not

enough to live

thru long odds. A coastline of perfume

sidewinds its way off your chest

and blooms its fist in the air above my head

Once, we pushed up

to a bar and you said when you blink,

you see me

dead before we met. I watch you blink

watch the surface of the world

close the surface close

over me. You brush past and out the doorway

and I catch a moment’s flood

of hallway light, and pause

while the pool of skin-sloped scent

becomes air. It leaves the shape

of Istria,

my index finger finds Pula

but it’s already a crescent moon, windplay

on a pond, then Thailand, Chile, the S-curve,

northbound

lane, South Shore Drive.

The scent between us sheds its skin,

its song floods the basement

of my eye. I see it swirl up

the heel-scuffed steps. You blink and it takes the light

Every glimpse of you is a gift, flesh-flash

in deathchance that blew itself

out. Straight thru me. This scent

from your breast

stalks itself thru the long odds

of my body. I’m alive. You

blink and I die. Blind tip. Your tongue can’t see

the hard-domed

entry wound high on my shoulder.

The one below, you say, looks

like it’s sleep

with a half-open eye. One

bullet’s still inside me. Dead metal

in my voice. You say that dead metal

when I say it,

you hold the metal in your name

like the bullet’s in your mouth, too heavy for its size

You blink and draw back

like you’ve heard a two-by-four crack.

You say, for you,

it’s a red-light boy with his hood up die bitch

you saw the kick push back his sleeve.

His gun, jammed, is always there. Deaf click of an open O

in your eye. You blink again, slow and long,

always and I stay dead

for ten seconds. Eyes closed,

you say the imagination’s infinite, the chance

of meeting there unthinkable.

I’m wounded in a way that makes me think

I can heal

around the metal. You say no matter how

much heavier than its size

allows,

it’s not enough. No

matter the metal, it’s no more than the sound

of sunlight and the taste of tin caught

in a bright sheet of water thrown across the grass from a pail

Like the shape of a scent, a voice with a bullet

in its chords will never

cover its shadow like lace

thrown over the top of a mirror. As far

as the mirrors go, you’re right.

You hold one. I, the other,

and light blows pieces

of us thru the room. I watch you kiss

the mask on my back. You wink a glow in a stainless

eye and scent shadows splay across the wall.

You’re in your full-length robe

of precision

and falling glass. I’m gone in blue light

thru a broken window

in your back, my limbs

break the beam

into spectrums of useless motion. The exit route

took a piece of my third rib, you

find the bone notch

with a finger and say this wound’s our fifth

nipple. It points away, rises always

to reach where the heat of your voice comes from

The snare rhythm of Method

and Mary from a passing car, —foryourbodyandyourskintone

the wrong vowel’s a pain net,

a stress in a word can turn flock of knives.

I gauze your face with my hands

and every night we lost what we lost

while you blink pours its wing-footed weight

back over us.

Eyes open, I see you seeing

me here. You blink. Pigments collapse

into a wound

and lighten the skin around it. An orbit

of surf against an atoll the weight of your name

what we

lost in my voice. The sound of that car rounds

the corner, loops the block,

you’re all, I need—lie

together cry together—they’re police, you say, they love that song

I push you back, away

from the light into velvet shadows

of the vestibule.

Clouded liquids

from a bowed sky bent like real trust

move between our mouths.

There’s always this

always between us. This metallic click. Our bodies

open and pressed against

the cold steel

of the front door, the El train’s tremor, blue

flash, suspends us

over deaths, we wonder how, were not our own.