Song - Fictional Work

Literary Review, Wntr, 2004 by Darcey Steinke

Bougainvillea petals blew around on the stone floor with a sound dry and melodic as you came into me. This was in that period of extreme weather. Heat waves followed by days of freezing rain. In that time of omens, large, medium, small, and extra small like the fact that your older sister adored cantaloupe while the younger one preferred sunflower seeds. And how in that small subterranean room with the twin beds and the walnut wardrobe, we were always cold. Staying under the comforter, both our bodies so thin that when we fucked our hipbones made a clicking sound a bit like a record skipping and there was your pale skin, your heart beating in your chest with a wet sound like water swishing through a pipe. That sound along with the click of our hips illuminated everything, so I could see deep down into the hole, the fine blonde hairs on my mother's cheek as well as bits of green glass in the dirt of Mrs. Johnson's garden. I saw everything all the way down into the night, drunk as I was on one thousand gin and tonics because everybody wanted you, boys and girls. I desired not after your body, which I already knew I could never make mine, but for the you in the glittering asphalt, the you in the gas oven's blue flame, the you in the pattern of bubbles in the glass of Coke. I had to convince you to come away from your computer and lay down with me on the futon because thinking has always been hard. I mean why make yourself into a clock when you can learn the names of the flowers? Once in the car, as we passed a bed of wild flowers I exclaimed, forgetting your prohibition, I LOVE LARKSPUR, and you flew into a rage. You also claimed that sunsets, the raspberry sky over Brooklyn, didn't really affect you that much. You loathed yourself more stylishly than I was accustomed to and so at first when I loved you without knowing you, it was like loving God.

Unable to sleep, you'd get up and stand by the fire. Nothing in the flame's light, not the mantle marble or the splintered mirror above it, suggested the modern world. You could have been a blacksmith in a La Tour painting, with your well developed chest now gone soft in middle age. In the morning, we left the island and drove to a hotel in Norfolk, ate Chinese food and watched E.T. at the theater. This was before pay-perview, even before cable, in that stone age when I ran around in my macrame bikini, my skin the color of milk chocolate. My white panties, your hard cock, our tan skin, we fucked every couple hours and got so high I put my hand through the headboard, through the wall and into the chest of the man next door. His heart like a peony, and I knew he had found a little peace, and so had I by loving your head of soft hair, your gray eyes. Yours was my first body, and I was scared every time you took your shirt off, your narrow shoulders shocked me back into childhood and made me miss the subtle erotics of my own family. My mother's cleavage. My little brother's belly button. My dad's fleshy upper arms. Light from the stereo illuminated the glass beads hanging over your doorway and sure, it was sexy in there. All kinds of stuff happened. Later, after we both came two hundred times, you'd kneel next to the porcelain tub and read to me. Your body, pressed against mine had the exact weight of a daydream as we lay down together on the flat bed boat, a pontoon I think they call them, with a dozen red and white striped seats. We laid together on the Astroturf. Rock music from the other side of the lake, teenagers laughing, your body covered with freckles. Your pelvis like a bowl of clean water as you said the word "cacophony" and the radiators clanged and you tapped your empty cigarette box against my fingers, which were clenched tight around a shot glass of bourbon, the liquid melting in several directions, and I knew we were over the guardrail parked in your orange Volkswagen looking out on the lights of the valley while terrible pop music played. We made out ferociously, the crotch of my jeans as wet as a wash cloth. Oh my love, my perfect one, my one of the 70s sideburns and redneck appeal.

Once kissing on a blanket spread out underneath a Sunday school bus you undid your pants and your cock slipped out. The prehistoric urgency of your hard-on and the sea lamprey-like slit at the top haunted me so that later as I lay in my childhood bed I couldn't sleep, so I got up to watch television, and there'd you be mending your fishing nets with a thick wooden needle. You could tell by the movement of the cedar branch in your yard if that morning the fishing would be worthwhile. If not you'd load split logs into the wood stove and we'd sleep, your chest pressed against my back, your hand on my hip. This was around the time I locked myself into the ladies' room of the restaurant where I worked, sat down on the closed toilet seat and said I LOVE YOU, to no one in particular. Afterwards I went into the walk-in with the bartender and we lay down on a flat of strawberries, and when I came out, the back of my white waitressing blouse looked like it was splattered with blood. But it was the milk in her breasts that haunted you, your wife standing drunk on the grass between your house and your neighbors, her panties stuffed into her back pocket, MILK, as you said many times, STILL IN HER TITS. You told this story in the holy space engendered after mutually fulfilling sex, as well as another incident. How you sat in a cafe across the street watching your father wait for you. After fifteen minutes he checked his watch, after forty he left. You looked like a paper doll cut out from the moon and so during the blizzard, I fled my parents' split level and met you behind the Hardees. You'd built a campfire. Brought a bottle of strawberry Boones Farm wine. Ice crystallized on the rust stains of your beard. But you hated nature, and when forced to hike up Mount Lavernea with the German couple you kept stopping, hands spread wide, a cynical expression infusing your features.