For the Rent
Today is the beginning of a new writing project. I won’t say much about it now, other than that it was inspired by Ezra Pound’s essay “Vorticism.” Check it out here (page 5). I’ll be composing (writing and editing) entirely on this page, so check back regularly for updates.
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We met near a little colored stall in summer, slices of watermelon dripping in the dusty street. We laughed at the drops falling from our elbows. She said, “I’m meeting a friend” and I told her the beach was closed.
Earlier a procession had gone by with red and streamers fluttering in the breeze, each flag representing one of the dead.
She pointed at the men kneeling at the beachfront, silhouetted by pale clouds behind them. “Look at their backs,” she said. Black ribbons of flies had attached themselves to the lips of the wounds.
I had watched those mourners beat themselves with dry leather straps, beads of blood trembling down their skin, dripping to the ground, mixing with dust to make mud. I had watched their lips slowly dry and crack – white foam forming trails at the corners of their mouths.
I stood alone watching, a sense of trembling moving from my limbs, pulling to the pit of my stomach, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. And all I could do to keep from sinking was to remember dusk homeward walks through the mountains and the white lilies, turned silver from the setting sun, spreading out into the meadows.
—-
The moon cast angles across my bed linens, like a city skyline drenched in fog. I attempted to organize the memory of her. Red painted fingernails on the rind. The white of her teeth offset by her pale pink lips. Her brow furrowing ever so slight when she laughed, like the finest lines of pencil on artist’s velum. The glint of sun through her hair as she turned to greet her friend. The lingering scent of bergamot and vetiver.
She lay before me like a fresh portrait smeared with an unsatisfied hand. The scent of cloves and tobacco in the air days after the artist had left. The crumbs of a sandwich on a tin plate. A cigarette butt in an overfilled ashtray. An empty bottle of Lafite. The portrait of the artist in the scraps or her life.
I remember the seagulls gathering at the top of his awning, shuffling and clawing across the peak. Each one screeching - a mess of tangled wings when a scrap was tossed into the dust.
I closed my eyes and imagined myself swooping over the tree tops. The air dry, harsh with static electricity. I flash down at the line of birds dotted across the roof. My talons cut one’s breast. His flesh comes alive and like the first splashes of color on a canvas.
-
At the seafront again and the mourners have gone. The sand is dotted with the places where their knees rested - surrounded by darkened specks where the blood had gathered up the sand and formed dark beads.
The sun is merciless today and no clouds in the sky - a clear harsh blue that forces a hand over my eyes.
Stains around the stall, darkened sand, gathered and coagulated into organized clumps.
