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| George, Again and again I am trying to write for you and still I fail. It isn't for your lack; you have given me everything I need and more. You have given me time and goodness and poetry and music and an overbrimming collection of memories and joyous things. I think mostly I'm scared that once I begin I will not find the words in me to do this feeling justice. I can't write anything huge enough to encompass this, and we are constantly building up, it gets hard for me to chase up all the words. I think all I can begin with are the solitary moments.
On my last birthday I wrote: "As I look back on my life it is with a very ordinary happiness, which is, after all the best kind." I wrote: "I think I am quieting down, less keen to share private moments honestly, but there is a growing richness inside".
It's been a year and only recently have I realised this isn't true at all. Ordinary happiness isn't what I want for my life. I want to be extraordinary; I want to believe that I have that much in me. And now, because of you, Van says I have reached a new level of happiness. Mandy says the same. They're right. And I think I have reached a new level of honesty with myself now, too, and I think that's why I find it so difficult to write. For once in my life I can discard words...words don't mean anything because I no longer need them to paint my life pretty. I am finally accepting all that my life is shaping up to me and I am so full of hope. I need no illusions. Everything is golden. Every day is becoming for me raw and undiluted and honest and I am learning to inhabit each moment as fully as I can. My joy is laid open, I am sharing so much of myself with loved ones and strangers, trying to spread that goodness, I am making my smile signify more and more, knowing that you envelope me completely, as a sheath, as protection. Your light, George, it's unbearable, it wards against the darkness and it radiates...do you know? Hurtful words, spite, all the bad, pedestrian things can't reach me; I'm untouchable. I am growing to be so rich and heavy with this, warmth and joy and loveliness, I feel it bursting out through me like sunrays. Every night for the past week I have slept to the scent of roses you have given me. Petals cup the water sustaining them, soft like skin kissing skin, every day you are a dream and you are the music.
We are formed so imperfectly, but I believe in this so much.
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I am put into a spell simply from your touch. Remember holding me at Ormond College in that manicured landscape? I looked over your shoulder so lost to myself in that trance, I could smell you, faintly, and the burnt-out husks of marijuana, and when I finally realised out of my cold staccato panic that I was meant to be enjoying the experience, all I could grip onto was you voicing reassurances, and beyond that, the muted green of the garden and the sudden orange sparks that were the flowers, brown wood thrushes flitting lightly through them. Orange juxtaposing grey light: I am so fascinated by your brown hair and the way it curls, your long brown lashes, your perfect brown irises, the warmth of your neck, the pink shell of your ears cupping my breath, my fear, your body cupping me, smoke and breath and fear.
I am the eye of the storm and settling so softly into you.
Now I am cold and you guide me into the chapel, we seat ourselves on a roughly-hewn bench, you remove my soaked shoes and leave them to dry near the fire. I dip my frozen feet towards the licking flames, my wet socks into the radiant heat. My senses are dulled...light slips away on the day after the winter solstice so rapidly but time slows down now. When I shift your arms come up and around my neck and loop me safely into a votive circle, your mouth at my ear so I can hear your breaths and the crackle of the fire and the crunch as Jun bites into an apple. The stained glass windows are a blessing behind us, filtering the shadows so that firelight dances like splashes of colour over the walls. Your hands never stop moving over me, a silent reassurance.
Thank you for being so good to me, I say.
You deserve being good to. The sentence doesn't work out. You know what I mean. You're mixed up, you aren't making sense.
I fall in love with this man over and over again.
In a separate room in the chapel someone takes up their violin and begins to pluck, begins to bow; the acoustics of my heart filling so widely this space, full of air, full of smoke and then the sureness of your sincerity.
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I wanted to write about the colours we saw at St Andrew's beach. I didn't think eyes could bear witness to much more beauty. You said something ontological on the long and loving bus ride to Rye about God's existence. That God must exist if we can imagine him greater than anything possible. Those colours were greater than anything I could imagine, tumbling from the sky like that, so accidental, greedy, so ravenous to be alive: rose, topaz, saffron, the colours of minerals and flowers mingling like a blurred garden in the sky. And I feel sunlight glinting off the waves, and I feel the waves are softer and more exultant than the feathers of snowy birds in flight, their sheer tidal power coating the beach in bubbling white...our world for that afternoon carved from ice and gold, pooling and cascading like hot liquid diamonds over black rock formations, the currents dragging us back and forth in a clockwork endurance. It was a space without gravity, because I was floating, because I was surrounded by the eddying laughter of my best friends, I had your arms around me, and it was God's playground, we were intruding on the home of saints. I don't have your fancy vocabulary a priori or a posteriori, I know not your philosophical terminology; I'm only proffering you the evidence; I'm only teasing you about the beauty. You took my breath away the following night with your candour, how you made sure I knew how much you loved every part of my "overflowing beauty", and I accept that you see beauty in me (because happiness makes people beautiful, I believe), but did you ever expect that this old world could surprise us like that, brimming over with such unrelenting beauty? And I must make room in my heart for the possibility of God's providence, only in such a place, and I cherish the tiny miracle that allowing room to hope brings with it.
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I want to tell you about Bloomsday, our anniversary, also the day Ted Hughes wedded Plath in the Church of Saint George the Martyr, but of course all these coincidences come later. I don't think I shall ever forget holding Helen's hand and feeling her papery cheek against mine and the welcome in her kisses. Her thick accent, her limited grasp of English sweetening my entire morning with her kindly words, I remember that smiling is a sort of language too, the universal one, possibly the best sort. I feel that once you open me up you will find so much I am grateful for, so much that was perfect about the day. If you could remember my arm slipping through yours as we traipsed past Baretto's before Mat accosted us for lunch, if you could remember how brilliant the sun was and how crisp the air, I felt it was a day made perfectly to articulate my feelings. And later in that afternoon as we walked up Grattan, the bounce so pronounced in my step that I spill coffee all over myself; I pass with you through that long line of trees, to the ruinous marble plinths outside the Royal Exhibition Building and its host of guardian dogs (with the size and fur of bears), we laugh at the man on the bench feeding the pigeons, we talk Greek mythology at the fountain made defunct by drought, small inconsequential moments of joy and somewhere in-between all this I feel my heart jolt as my arm slips down yours my hand loosely falling into your outstretched palm and at last our fingers lacing again, ribbons of light stitching across my ribs like a gasp. It's just like at the cinema; it's just like your song as it speeds up, just as you said it: tachycardia.
I want mostly to tell you about the Gardens as evening fell. All the waterfowl taking up their choruses as we sit like statues in the bunching winter. You tell me about the solstice, I am content to listen to your voice, inhale your heady scent. I wrote about it some time ago, after the lecture Ciara crashed, I could smell you even then and I could not stomach being without it: "musk and rose and that earthy roasted vanilla, freshly wetted pine". I was not born a sommelier. I honestly have no idea what you are so redolent of, but those are the words that spring to mind. On this particular occasion I can detect the familiarity of your smell, and then the flowers and sweet young grass, the rain, freshly turned soil. I tell myself never to forget the image as we sit here on the bench, and always it burns in me so richly. Our hands, yours veined and taut and pale and clever, somewhat delicate in that light, the gloaming draping over the cool sharp grasses, dew settling into us as we sit so porous and open to each other. You are gazing off into the lake, into a middle distance I cannot follow, hidden in your thoughts. I love that look when it hangs about you, I want to take it up, fold it into my hands, all in an effort to come closer to understanding the mysteriousness of your being. You are so deeply contemplative and you rest so much in every moment, your arm around me, your hand stroking my shoulder in circles over and over again. My palm lies flat over your chest, and I hear the thumping of your heart, I hear birdsong trilling in F#, my face tickled by your stubble, your jacket laid over us so futilely against the wind. Everything, everything about the sunset is soft, lingering, my eyes drinking in pink and blue and gold and amber, you had tied those sweet scented lilies which you stole to the lace ribbon around my wrist, now soft bands of light slowly disappear from the sky and we make our way back to Richmond station in the dark. On the bridge the scenery has morphed into a nocturne, neon lights fanning over the river, the wrought iron streetlamps with their ivory glow bathing the cyclists, the cars on the freeway, it's 10 degrees according to the Nylex tower, I'm in love with this city and a little in love with you too.
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Waking in your arms halfway through the night, you feel me shift, your voice cracked from hours of looking after me, and yet you rise and bring me water, bring the cup up to my mouth, I drink and I am sated. I fold back into you, and into your embrace I begin firing off any questions I can think to ask, all the usual array of politics, religion, geography and the biology of love. You teach me about Al Gore and the Nobel Prize, you teach me about oxytocin and the interplay of hormones that constitutes love, the evolution of desire, lust to diversify our gene pool, I ask about the animal basis of monogamy, but really I am enquiring after your loyalty...I ask if you believe in love ideologically, and you segue into lysozyme in kisses...you ask me the name of the hollow at the base of a woman's neck, between her collarbones, while you learn my contours it's only natural to try to name the topology of the female body: it's Ondaatje, it's Medicine, and it’s called the
suprasternal notch.
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Another succession of images and I'll recall for you the back beach on Tuesday night. We could have been the only two humans on the planet, we could have been reduced to even less than that; momentarily, I would have believed us to be the only conscious thought in that huge bleak universe, and that tympanic roar and fury of the waves was the only music we were capable of making in such a desolate soundscape. I could have remained for some hours there, stung by sand and salt and sea, all my being concentrated so fiercely on the task of survival; it was almost primal, that desert of human contact. We were sitting on driftwood, the wind pressing the hard sand against our forms like cruel sculptures, like dark night and ash at Pompeii, me cresting up in your arms and breaking over you like waves, and into the dome of the sky the stars regally begin appear, each so alone in space and time, and so vastly commanding. You point out Jupiter, you point out Saturn and I am lost at my own foreignness to the universe, questioning the last time I had truly regarded the stars. We may be such small players in all this, but I feel conviction that it's all the earth really needs to save us: our awe, our appreciation, a chronicle that we have lived here, that we have loved this life. You told me two nights prior that the world will weary of us, of mankind...how could you believe it, when all you can feel from our beating hearts to the edge of the night is sand and alabaster foam, the dunes knitting itself up with dusty coastal scrub, waves creeping up and caressing that infinite shore? I told you then, curling desperately into your voice, how I wanted to raze all of this civilisation to the ground, I wanted passage by fire and water, you made some joke about mud huts, if we dug far enough that night, enough for me to lay the bare bones of my thought over yours, I would have preferred that our entire species be faceless, nameless, homeless, lost in that we recognised finally our belonging everywhere. It was enough to sit in silence, the chill and wet burning into me.
Given the rawness of our spinning universe, given the night and the stars and the overwhelming knowledge of our smallness, is it any wonder then that we fall finally, fitfully into those primitive roles long programmed by our bodies? Like the remembrance of some far-off dream millions of lifetimes ago, we take up the only thing we've all known from the beginning, the biological pattern, a dance our ancestors invented, memorised through repetition and careful orchestration...ingrained in us...the night is energy dissipating as heat...you are so smooth and in your wake you leave my flesh malleable and blushing.
You should write this all down, you murmur into my skin; my laughter has never sounded quite so breathless. Shut up and kiss me, you demand, there's no other wish I'd respect so completely, nothing else to which I'd submit myself so readily. My city sacked and carried off without struggle siege or coup. I am surrendered, pliant, yielding, yours. I ask you for the key, you say A Major, your fingers moving against the small of my back, and I want to hear the notes but all I gather is the trembling silence, densely, breath on my ear, you say the word "sensual" and all my senses are on fire from that low satisfied rumbling in your chest.
How are you so soft? Your neck is so soft. Your mouth ironic against me; never have I felt the air so softly passing from lips to lips, from your lungs, the pores of my skin willing, waiting, I am supplicant to your touch...hallowed in that air, never have I heard a softer voice, felt softer fingers graze against me, I thank some benign and gracious entity that you can play the piano so quietly that the sound falls away, and I want nothing more than to be an instrument for you, one you have claimed and named and given new purpose. All atoms in me focused and tuned for another kind of music. Suddenly I marvel at the human body, suddenly I cherish anatomy, I want to label all parts of your body, I want to learn you again and again. The longing bursts like an aching through all my body and I am a flower, my petals falling away softly...and now again I am amber honey and dew, liquefying so viscously, and now an elemental force taking over this space, passage by fire and water, and something rougher yet: I'm igneous, my blood molten and so full of giggling, I'm burning up, I am so heavy with love and desire, I am stitched together from gasps and the glory is all that is really keeping me from dissolving.
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When I wake my heart is gladdened to be still lying next to you, so languid in the morning light. I blink my way out of restive sleep over the course of the next few hours as the sun illumines the leaves into shadow puppets against the curtains and oh, oh as the wind coerces them to dance. It's noon. I am the instrument of an infinite grace.
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Melding into you in the city-stained night, I whisper my favourite Neruda quote: "I want to do with you--"
You cut me off, you catch me with a kiss and you finish what has been in me all along: "what spring does with the cherry trees". | | |
| Virgil; The Aeneid
Book IV; my translation. But the queen, for a long time wounded by her grave affliction, nurtures the wound in her veins, and is consumed by a hidden fire. Much of the courage of the hero returns many times to her mind, and much of the honour of his family; his face and words cling fixed in her heart, nor does her worry give placid rest to her limbs. The next day, Phoebus Apollo was traversing the earth with a lamp, and Aurora had removed the dewy shadow from the heavens, when distraught, she addresses her soulmate sister thus: Anna sister, what dreams terrorise me, held in suspense? Who is this strange guest who came to our realm? What bearing is in his face! What strength in his chest and his arms! I believe indeed, and it is not an unfounded faith, that his line is of the gods: fear shows up degenerate minds. Alas, that man, tossed by such fates! What wars, endured till the finish, he was relating! If it was not sitting fixed and unmoving in my mind, and if I did not wish to ally myself to anyone in the bond of marriage, after my first love deceived me, beguiled by death; if I had not been wearied by wedding couch and marriage torch, perhaps, to this one man, I could have succumbed to weakness.
Anna, for I will confess, after the fate of poor Sychaeus, my husband, and the household gods spattered with slaughter by a brother, this man alone has swayed my feelings, and impelled my floundering spirit: I recognise the vestiges of ancient passion, but I would choose first that either the earth would yawn to its depths for me, or that the almighty father, with a thunderbolt, would hurl me to the shadows, the pallid shadows of Erebus and profound night, before, Chastity, I violate you, or break your laws. That man took away my love, who first joined me to him; let that man have it with him and keep it safe in the grave. Thus, having spoken, she filled her breast with rising tears. Anna replies: O more beloved to your sister than light, will you live out your youth grieving, forever alone with the ghosts, will you not know sweet children, nor the rewards of Venus? Do you believe that the ashes or buried ghosts would care for it? Let it be, that no husband has swayed you before, sick at heart, not at Libya, not before at Tyre; Iarbas, having by scorned, and the other leaders, whom the land of rich Africa nourishes with triumphs: will you fight even a pleasing lover? Does it not come to mind whose lands you are settling in? From this side, the Gaetulian cities, a race unconquerable in war, and the unbridled Numidians surround you, and inhospitable Syrtis; from that side the thirsty desert region, and the inhabitants of Barce, raging far and wide. What should I say of wars rising up at Tyre, and the threats of your brother? Indeed, I think, with the blessings of the gods and Juno's assistance, the Trojan ships held this course on the wind. What a city, sister, what a kingdom you will perceive to rise up from such a marriage! With the arms of Trojans accompanying you, Punic glory will rise to what great achievement! You only beg the pardon of the gods, and having performed the sacred rites, give free rein to hospitality, and weave the causes of delaying, while the winter rages upon the sea and Orion brings rain squalls, and the ships are battered while the sky is not tractable. With these words, she inflamed her incensed mind with love, and gave hope to her wavering mind, and dissolved her shame. First they visited the shrines, and sought peace amid the altars: they sacrificed the chosen sheep according to custom, to law-giving Ceres and Phoebus Apollo and father Lyaeus, to Juno before all others, to whose care are the bonds of marriage. Most beautiful Dido herself, holding a bowel in her right hand, pours the wine midway between the horns of the gleaming white cows; or before the faces of the gods, she paces before richly endowed altars, and renews her offerings throughout the day, and laying open the breasts of beasts, peering eagerly, consults the breathing entrails. Alas, the ignorant minds of seers! What do votive gifts, what do temples help her, maddened with love? A flame eats at her soft marrow meanwhile, and a silent wound lives within her heart. Unhappy Dido, burnt, wanders madly over all the city, like a deer shot by an arrow, which unaware, the shepherd wounded from afar amid the Cretan grove with his weapon, and though he knows not, has left in her the winged shaft: she, in flight, moves through the woods and glades of Dicte; the deadly shaft clings to her side. ... After they came to the high mountains and the trackless lairs, look, wild goats, having leapt off the summit of boulders, run down along the ridges; from other open parts, they cross in their course over the plains, and stags gather their dusty bands in flight, and abandon the mountains. But the boy, Ascanius, in the middle of the valley, rejoices on his high-spirited horse, and now he crosses these in his path, now he passes those, and wishes in his prayers to be given a foaming boar among the timid herds, or a tawny lion to descend from the mountain. Meanwhile, the sky began to churn with a great thunder: a storm cloud followed, mixed with hail. And the Tyrian companions, and the Trojan youths, and the Dardan grandson of Venus, scattering in all directions through the fields, sought shelter from fear: small freshets streamed down from the mountains. Dido and the Trojan leader came down to that same cave. Both Mother Earth and Juno as the bride’s attendant gave the signal: lightning flashed and the air was conscious at their union, and Nymphs wailed on the topmost crags. That was the first day of death and the first cause of evils. For neither was she moved by appearances or reputation, nor did Dido now consider it a clandestine love: she calls it a marriage; with this name she covers her sin. At once, Rumour, at Libya, goes through the great cities, Rumour, an evil than which no other is faster: she grows strong in her movement, she acquires power as she goes; at first, in her timidity, she is small; soon she raises herself up into the breeze, and moves upon the ground, and hides her head amid the clouds. Mother Earth bore her, enraged by ire against the gods, parenting her, so they say, the last sister to Coeus and Enceladus, swift of foot and with nimble wings, a horrendous monster, huge, who has as many feathers on her body as so many watchful eyes underneath, wonderful to relate, so many tongues, just as many mouths sound, she pricks up so many ears. By night she flies in the middle of the sky and earth, hissing through the darkness, nor does she droop her eyes in sweet sleep. In the daylight, she sits sentinel on the highest ridge of the building, or on the high turrets, and terrifies the great cities, as tenacious of vicious and depraved pronouncements as truthful ones. She then fills the people with various rumours, delighting, and broadcasts alike both true happenings and false: that Aeneas had come, sprung from Trojan blood, to whom the beautiful Dido, thinking the hero worthy, joins to herself in marriage; now they cherish their luxury throughout the winter, however long, forgetful of their kingdoms, and held captive by shameful lust. These tidings, the loathsome goddess poured in all directions into the mouths of men. Right away, her course turned aside to the king Iarbas, and incensed his mind with words, and aggravated his rage. ... But the queen foresees tricks (who could deceive a lover?), and instantly divines the intended movement, safe, fearing everything. The same unholy Rumour informs the raging queen that the fleet is armed and a route for the voyage prepared. She rages, helpless in her mind, and incensed, moves through the city in a frenzy; just as a Bacchanal, aroused by the waving of sacred emblems, when the triennial festivals for Bacchus excite her, when the cry of Bacchus is heard, and Cithaeron calls in the night with the shouts of worshippers. At last, she confronts Aeneas with these words first: Did you even hope to be able to cover up so great a crime, traitor, and leave my land silently? Does not our love, nor my pledge once given you, nor Dido, doomed to perish in a cruel funeral rite, detain you? Do you even labour at the fleet under a wintry sky, and do you hasten to go through the deeps in the midst of north winds, cruel one? What? If you did not seek foreign fields and unknown homes, and ancient Troy remained, would Troy be sought with your fleet through the billowy sea? Do you flee from me? By these tears and your right hand, since I now have left to my hapless self nothing else – through our marriage, through the wedding nuptials undertaken, if I have, in anything, deserved well of you, or if there was anything about me sweet to you: pity the falling house, and I beg, if there is still any place for prayers, drop this dread purpose. On your account, the Libyan race, and the ruler of Nomads hate me, Tyrians are hostile to me; on account of you, too, my chastity is extinguished, and my previous reputation, by which alone I sought to reach the stars. For whom do you desert me, doomed to die, guest? Since this name alone is left in place of "husband". Why do I delay? Either until my brother Pygmalion destroys my city walls, or Gaetulian Iarbas leads me as a captive? At least, if any child had been conceived by me from you, before your flight, if some little Aeneas were playing for me in court, who nevertheless could recall your face, I would not seem, for my part so utterly betrayed and utterly forsaken. She had spoken. He was holding his eyes unmoving at the bidding of Jupiter, and after a struggle, he kept stifling his distress in the depths of his heart. At last he replied with a few words: "I never will deny, queen, that you have deserved the utmost which you are able to list in speech: nor will it ever disgust me to remember Elissa, while I am mindful of myself, while breath directs these limbs. I shall say a few things as the occasion demands. I did not hope to conceal this flight in secrecy, (you must not imagine I lie); nor did I offer you a wedding ceremony nor entered such a contract. If the fates allowed me to lead my life under my own auspices, and to order my cares of my own accord, I would first devote myself to the city of Troy, and the sweet relics of my people; if the high towers of Priam remained, and I could have restored by my own hand Pergama, for the conquered. But now Gryneas Apollo orders me to make for great Italy, the Lycian oracles, order me to make for Italy; this is my love, this is my homeland. If the Carthaginian citadels, Phoenissa, and the aspects of the Libyan city hold you back, why is it hateful then for Trojans to settle in Ausonian land? Also, we are right to seek foreign kingdoms. The unquiet ghost of my father Anchises, whenever the night covers the earth with dewy shadow, whenever the fiery stars rise, warns and frightens me in my sleep; the boy Ascanius warns me, and the injury to his dear life, whom I cheat of the kingdom of Hesperia, and his destined lands. Even now, the messenger of the gods, sent by Jupiter himself (I swear by both our lives) brings down the orders through swift breezes. I saw the god myself in the clear light entering the city walls, and drank in his voice with these ears. Cease to incense both you and me with your complaints; I journey to Italy not by my own free will." All the while, turned aside as he speaks such words, rolling her eyes, she has
been watching his whole person with a silent gaze, and kindled with passion, she
speaks out thus: "The goddess was not your parent, nor was Dardanus the originator
of your family, traitor, but the bristling Caucasus gave birth to you on cruel crags, and
Hyrcanian tigers thrust their udders at you. Why should I cover up my feelings? Or
save myself for greater things? Surely he has not groaned at our weeping? Surely
he has not turned down his eyes? Surely, overcome, he has not brought forth
tears, nor pitied his lover? What shall I say first? Now, now neither the greatest
Juno, nor the father descended from Saturn look upon these actions with impartial
eyes. Nowhere is loyalty safe. Cast up from his own shore, I received him, in need,
and distraught, set him up a place in a part of my kingdom; when the fleet had been
lost, I rescued his companions from death. Alas, I am being carried off, set on fire
by madness! Now the prophet Apollo, the Lycian oracles, and just now the messenger
of the gods sent by Jupiter himself bring horrid commands through the breezes. No
doubt, that is concern to the powers above, that worry disturbs their repose. Neither
do I seek to hold you, nor argue against your words: Go, journey to Troy on the
wind: seek your realms through the waves. I hope indeed, if the righteous gods can
do anything, that you will drain the punishment in the middle of the rocks, and you
will often call out the name Dido. I will follow you with smoky flames from far away;
and when icy death will have separated your spirit from your limbs, I will be present
in all places as a shade. You will pay the penalty, villain. I shall hear, and this report
will come down to me to the lowest pits of Hades." She broke off these words in
the middle of her speech, and sick at heart, she fled through the breezes, and averted
her eyes from the sight of men, and withdrew, leaving him in frightened hesitation
and preparing to say many things. The maidservants undertook the fainting queen,
and bore her collapsed body to the wedding chamber of marble and set her down
carefully on the bed. But the dutiful Aeneas, although he desires to soothe her grieving by consoling
and to remove her cares with words, with much sighing and shaken to his heart by
great love, nevertheless he follows the orders of the gods and returns to the fleet.
Then, truly, the Trojans set to work, and they launch their high ships all along the
shore. The well-oiled ships float; and they brought leafy branches for oars and unhewn
timber from the wood, in their eagerness for flight. You could see them on the move,
and rushing from every quarter of the city; and even as when ants plunder huge heaps
of grain, mindful of winter, and bring grain back to their dwellings: the black column
goes over the plains, and they carry their spoils through the grasses on the narrow path;
some push great grains of corn thrust upon their shoulders; some shepherd the column
and chide delayers; the path seethes with the work of all. How did you feel then, Dido, seeing such activity, what sighs were you giving, when
you perceived that the beach widely seethed from the highest citadel, and you saw
the whole sea to be churning before your eyes with great clamour? Wicked love,
what do you not drive mortal hearts to feel? She felt compelled to go again in tears,
to assail him again by entreating, and to subdue her spirit to her lover as a supplicant,
lest she leave anything untried, destined to die in vain. "Anna, you see that they hasten all along the shore: they gather around from all sides;
now the sail calls out to the breezes, and the sailors joyfully place garlands on the sterns.
If I could have foreseen sorrow so great as this, sister, I could have also endured it.
Nevertheless, perform this own thing for wretched me, Anna: for that traitor has been
cultivating you alone, confiding to you even secret feelings; only you knew the times
when that man was approachable. Go, sister, and humbly address the proud enemy:
I did not swear with the Danai to destroy the Trojan race at Aulis, or send a fleet to
Pergama: nor did I tear up the ashes of father Anchises, or disturb his ghost. Why
does he refuse to listen to my words with his hard ears? Whither does he rush? Let
him give this last gift to his pitiable lover: let him await an easier flight and favouring
winds. Now I beg not for former marriage, which he betrayed, nor that he be without
the beautiful Latium and relinquish his kingdom: I seek an empty time, a repose and
respite from madness, until fortune teaches me, vanquished, to grieve. I beg this final
mercy -- take pity on a sister; which, when you will have given it to me, I will repay
with interest at my death." ... ... "Sweet vestiges, while fate and the gods were allowing it, accept this spirit,
and release me from these cares. I have lived my life and completed the
course which fortune had given me, and now my great ghost goes under the
earth. I have founded a famous city. I have seen my battlements; I have avenged
my husband. I received punishments from a hostile brother; I should have been
happy, alas, too happy, if only the Dardan keels had never touched our shores!"
She spoke, and with face pressed against the bed: "I will die unavenged, but
let me die," she said. "Thus, thus, it pleases me to go down into the darkness.
May the cruel Dardan drink in this fire with his eyes from the deep sea, and
bring with him the omens of my death." She had spoken, and her companions viewed her fallen in the midst of such
words on the blade, and the sword foaming with blood, and her spattered
hands. A shout goes to the highest halls; Rumour rages through the shaken city.
The homes resound with weeping and groans and the wailing of women; the
upper air echoes with great lamentation. Just as if all of Carthage or ancient
Tyre were rushing with the pouring in of enemies, and the raging flames roll
through the homes of men and of gods. The sister heard it, distraught, and
terror-struck in her trembling course, marring her face with her fingernails, and
her breast with her fist, she rushes through the midst, and calls on the dying
Dido by name: "Was this the point of that, sister? Did you seek to deceive me?
Was this what that dreadful pyre, that fire and altars were preparing me for?
What shall I complain of first, deserted? Did you despise your comrade sister,
dying? You should have called me to the same fate: The same grief and the same
hour should have carried off both of us by the sword. Have I even built this pyre
with these hands, and called the country's gods with my voice, so that, with you
lying in such a way, cruel one, I should be absent from you? You have destroyed
yourself and me, sister, and your people, and your Sidonian ancestors, and your
city. Give me water to wash the wounds, and if any last breath wanders above
you, I shall collect it in my mouth." Having spoken thus, she mounted the high steps, and having embraced her,
half-conscious, she was holding her close in her lap, with sighs, and she was
drying her black blood with her robes. Dido, having tried to lift her heavy eyes,
swooned again; the fixed wound hissed under her heart. Lifting herself thrice,
she raised herself up, having leant on her elbow: thrice she fell back on the couch,
and she sought with wandering eyes the light in the high heavens, and having
found it, groaned. Then almighty Juno, pitying her long suffering and difficult passing, sent Iris
down from Olympus, to release her struggling spirit and convulsed limbs. For,
because neither by fate nor by deserted death she was perishing, but pitiably,
before her day, and kindled with a sudden madness, Proserpina had not yet
taken away the golden lock from her crown, and condemned her life to Stygian
Orcus. Therefore, dewy Iris flies down through the heavens on saffron wings,
dragging a thousand many-hued colours against the sun, and comes to rest
above her head: "I bear this lock of hair, sacred to Dis, as commanded, and I
release you from that body." She spoke thus, and cleft the lock with her right
hand. All at one time, her warmth slipped away, and her life receded into the breezes. | | |
| OUR DELIVERER, THE WINGS & HARBINGER OF WIND I. BIRTH There’s midnight frost on the fingers of the lost, the roads are still alive and lighting chance meetings; journeys end in lovers’ meeting. I know I’m only dreaming, seeing you like this but you’re making your way to the waterfront café, where you hedge your bets there will be contact, there will be contact, and this hope wakes me at 3 AM as I lie in bed, and my lonely bones make angles with the world, waiting for a wordless transcendence that will not come. But home is where the heart is. My home in China, and you. My heart in my body, beating out the regular rhythms of life. I am not lost but split in two, a ripped pomegranate scattering seed winds. II. CONTACT You’ve made contact, however tenuous. This much we’ve established. In the Internet café, advertisements in the window fan neon over the river and the phosphor glow from night cruises splits the river into a million private arms, a call to arms for the celestial hosts and their blaring brasses. And the satellites chart their driving conduit through mischanced orbits, rebounding off stars to lay words of recompense at my feet. Stars that cover you with soft plastered messages, stars that reply with the quicksilver sex of nymphs, all their frosted fingers dipping, raised to a hush in starhewn lips. Lips that fall to kiss your feet, and vast stars that dive-drown in a milky sea, between you so far and me. The satellites burn up the heavens in disdain, man invading godspace. III. GLORY & FLOW I do miss you. It’s huge, this absence, every day. Like swimming in a bed made of light, and grasping for something solid, groping the light switch and turning all to shade. Accidents do happen, accidents cause darkness, but hope underpins it all. Pandora found it, Hope, and the promise of human contact. Huger still is Shanghai in the moving dark, a port of giants laced with incandescent riggings. Such grandness impedes movement, damming flow, so that broad Yangtze, her hips and swelling wings, finds a brief respite in that damaged cradle. In all else, the Yangtze is without rest, languid but ceaseless in a hymnal air, a fearful beauty damning change, damming flow. Such is the power the Fates must feel, damming the tide of fortune. All those abrasive lives slipping over the fingers, weaving into other stories, epic men and their epic tragedies laying siege the gods. It would take only one nip at the thread, and all things would fray. IV. THE FIRST KNOWLEDGE I have an unenlightened view of the world. Evolution has no place in wings they’re either of the soft feathery variety, or none at all, no gradation, so stop trying to convince me that you’re a modern-day Icarus. It won’t fly. So what if there’s a white smoke in the air about your shoulders, it may be only the brushfire of sleet around your body, coating like an armament. Apollo lays a gold wreath at your head; it’s no halo, this petty trick of light. The first time we met again you told me you took two showers a day. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all, and it exhumes all that dirty work, the mistakes made in love. I was so guarded against you, a fortress. And then I thought of ice statues playing tunes on city lights, fragmentary. Laughing girls were dancing like small auroras across a patterned sky dipping their heads as a deer to drink in the cool sweet air. I didn’t want you to die. All this you brought to me, fragments of sky and a wish for us to survive. It melted my waxwork, the wings wrought for my escape. I stayed with you, an island in the abyss. I grazed the sun, I must admit. You always brought me higher. You were music and rarefied air, leaving no dirt in your wake, your footfalls making soft the shadow puppets and the red paper fire. You were ragged with starlight and husky with the breath of winter nymphs. Through the storm of polluted air you came flying, an unbidden gift. In winter months you were the warmth, all of it. CHORUS I wanted to show you that there are two sides to everything I wanted to show you the two sides to me, that rift in time between seed, flower, fruit, the rift we tore in our days from this time zone to the next, all the fabric of the continuum. We tore three hours from each other, three stages of life from birth to flowering to the ripeness of falling away and it was so selfish, you standing there in a day so bright it left splashes on my dress, my faint skin and the sudden sweetness of pomegranates. You just standing there, so beautiful and craven all at once. Impossible. It was a violation of our capacity for sorrow that night, so much joy tumbling out of each other into that dense expanse of our lives. Our lips, our sinful flesh, freewheeling back to the beginning. We were never so beautiful; we knew we were never meant to be. And if we were to revel only in this, this forbidden fruit, bathe in each other’s glow, we’d be gods, so vast and paltry in ourselves. V. Q. & A. & THE FALL What happens in a world for the unbeautiful? What happens then? The quiet finality of your insistence: You’re beautiful, and then, You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful. The question of my darknesses pressing against the light of every day, like a muted cloth bulging. Hope at the bottom, arrow-weighted and deadly, a secret shaft of light. Here are our hands grasping and holding and not letting go. What happens in a world for the beautiful? We’re exiled We are drifting bodies in this vast space of lost time. The urgency presses us on all sides, a relentless life told in the stars, a trick of the light, a house of cards set to explode. Time is a sleight of hand, and time too can change into truth. Change the truth into a loss of heart. Our truth is a basic axiom, warping the continuum into a hope. We all make mistakes in love. It is in forgiving humanness that we find the ultimate courage. Most of all because I want to pay testament to this, because we have never been so lovely in our lives, never stood for anything so beautiful. Standing there, you flooded by love and light, holding the cusp of the world. If given this time on earth, and time again, another chance to feel the wind from another planet this unadulterated starlight, the heady promise of touch – How long the wait? The knowledge falls to ripeness in our wake, and how. VI. FRANGIBLE HEART We were walking through the tumescent back alleys of Melbourne. Your skin was a study in chiaroscuro, shaded so by the overbearing buildings, the muted streetlamps like liquid amber. Hair wet in the soft rain, plastering to our cheeks, each to the burning other. The street was so vastly empty that our voices distorted into plaintive wails. You were talking about jealousy, so I told you about Juno, the slighted lover. "If you can look into the night sky, tell me that you don’t see the stars, then Jupiter is faithful.” Her hand’s arching back, accusation spilling from her fingertips to the constellations, constellations. “I forbade her humanity, and Jupiter turns her into a goddess.” The starlight’s a million billion years old. It’s coming to Juno in waves from the beginning of time, from the birth of stars and all things elemental. But right now the light is flooding and it grows around her like a halo The luminosity’s taking the shape of Jupiter’s paramour. Light as her hair, streaming; it cups like hands around her curves, dips at her dulcet waist, the glimmering grace of her thigh, the inward arch of her heel. She’s effulgent. There’s nothing in the universe like her. And jealous Juno can only bemoan terrible beauty, as humanly as godly, the roaring sting of Jupiter’s lust. Even gods need someone to hold at night. The Olympian gods so huge so petty, meshing limbs, tangling. VII. THE CONSTANT, THE ONLY LAW The lady on the moon is Chinese folklore. The lady on the moon is nothing like Juno. Juno is the moon, ours. The lady on the moon is only an inhabitant of that uncompromising landscape, a fragment of our ancient history. Pandora broke the box once and she broke it again. But lessons are hard learnt and acknowledging humanness is our virtue and vice. On the other side of the world, Chang Oh drank the elixir of youth, a prize from the Emperor to her glorious husband, arrowed marksman architect of the universe, who shot down the tenth sun, and kept burning the axis of love for is immortal wife, though she now orbits the moon and around her the nine suns revolve in a continuum of regret. Chang Oh, long swan. Pandora, all gifts. Naming is knowledge and first knowledge is birth. Another barren birth on a waterless rock. One founded all evils and a final saving grace the other found only drugged wings to the moon. She’s got some cherry trees up there now, maybe bored some holes for water. She keeps a rabbit for a companion, anything for contact, a reason for her voice. Aloneness is something we understand very well in our striving for touch, warmth. We have all been marooned on this island of earth in a great abyss studded with meteorites and gravity and the lie of dimensional time. If I had to be stuck on a desert island, I’d choose you. When the stars have freewheeled into the eighth month of the lunar year A milkwashed bridge spans the gap between Earth and the heavens In folklore, one night is given to the lovers, highest above that vast chasm and full wanton moon. Another reason for survival when the life you have is not the one you choose and the life you orbit is a shade closer to the sun you killed. The cusp of the universe learns to hold its breath once a year as it stitches up the fabric of sky and godspace. He shoots himself from the bow of the world, high-strung, onto this felted bridge, knowing the wind from another planet on his face, his foreign hands relearning for one night her lightness, the wing bones that cast her up through the ether. Beneath her moon dusted gown, the peaks and dips of her contours are holy in that air. An impossible offering. Her saving grace built in her songs a tragedy and ignorance. We still worship her; hear as music her restive pacing in the heavens. The keeper of time is the lunar calendar, drawing our tides together, the maiden on the moon slowly going loony. Our lives are mixing incontrovertibly because we are all ancestral history, our biological blueprint doesn’t speak of love, only of mating, mutating the flood of a flowing and growing and the damming of a gene pool. It speaks of birth and seed but not of love but that is another reason for contact – The voice is a story in itself and its subject is love. Do you see now? Every you and every me binds and unfastens in an endless endurance. VIII. CROSS POLLINATION Nothing dares move now. The Minotaur grazes in a neon labyrinth of river ripples. Olympians take to their beds on high, and the lowly lives break in slumber. Sometimes it gets like this, as if we were the only slur of humanity awake and pacing in a world full of exiles, if we were the only chosen ones crossing the mouth of Hades, a contrived unfolding to the nether shores of that underworld city. Cerberus at the gates wants to swallow you whole. So do you let him? Do you let anyone completely consume you? Let go and feed yourself to the dogs, the wolves, the carnivorous lambs of gods. It’s a nice taste, the flesh of your lips, Styx and your waters. I am not telling myths about private darknesses. I am talking about the light, the bright, unfailing absence of it. Love and consequence. Nothing else. Nothing else moves as I follow you, not here, not in this life or any. When we leave this place of dust and rot, this small sphere of the dead I will scatter like impossible seeds into a home that is you, nurture a heart for us, just one. Make for us a life. If I were to become nothing else, just this wet comma of light on the bridge while you hold me, the milky breath of poplars swelling green lungs, lining the channel of the river, starry eyes watching us trying to keep this life together, a humble river god and a silken nymphet unremarkable amongst the reeds. I am looking for a hearth and home. I’m looking for a fire, if you could light one in me, please. See, I’m starting to understand it all, every trial, every hung moment dried and dusted. I know the wait, the length, lay and lie of time. There is a story in music and life and love, and then there is you, wide-open joy flung far. I’m on my way there, bypassing bridges, wading into your waters. I’ve been looking for you. All my life, and I was never lost. I am making your story my story, ours. I am the heart of the river, here since the beginning, beating the spent blood back to you, beating me, the lifeblood, back through your veins, to your heart. I am bridging the gap until the cusp and falling away. to j., bridge of our year & years to come who taught me all words in this foreign language who is not epic, nor fated in stars & song but brought first knowledge of wholeness in love: a heart & home, the universe in these. | | |
| What we lost here was the possibility of change. Maybe you will look back on it one night, years later, and you will remember the early days, the days when she first began to leave you. You will be gripping the wheel while manoeuvring the icy incline of some great Bavarian autobahn, and you will be fearful, and it will come back to you. One afternoon and you were sixteen. You will think of parachutes and summer snowstorms and all these things you've come to understand only exist in the lonely plane of dreams. All these things you consider to be impossible rise and you would like to reach them, but the path is long and fickle and when it changes, you are back where you first started -- that indecision, those eyes heavy with supplication. If you asked for atonement – hers – after all these years, what would you find? Not closure, nor cessation, nor a containment of pride. If you asked for atonement you would unearth a dozen blank rooms with her glorious laughter shaking every lock, the windows broken; you crawl in, you bleed out. Blood on the walls, blood on each other’s hands. “Were we guilty?” you say, “Was I wrong?” You’re in a car to nowhere and you’re swerving heavily through the fog. You’ve survived this long, amazed into reverent silence at your own luck. You’re pulling over; you’re stalled and knee-deep in snowdrifts and memories. And you’re raising those heavy supplicating eyes to the mountains, whence cometh help, come the Magi, the men of unbearable knowledge who barter with the devil every day of their lives for a slice of heaven on earth. They're saying in their exacting wisdom, "Take these words for lamplights, or take the lamplights for what they are -- orbs in the night, glowing on our hands while you steal warmth from the air about you, and the snow is chill white drifting over mountains and cusps, and this is only everything, everything."
They're saying they'll take you back.
Here you are in Eden; the sun soaking up the clouds from behind, the rain misting the ground with tiny rivulets of smoke and ash and cleanliness. Here the dewy flowers, the grasses slippery. Everything is washed, newly baptised, the thin scorching of her laughter streaming into rarefied air -- you couldn't talk about it, even if you wanted, you couldn't ever capture this. You are wading into sea-lake and brine and she is with you, laughing, as white crested foam tickles her ankles, and over your bodies the fireflies tease out little lighted haloes into the fresh-cut air. The stars playing lambent lullabies over the waves. The world so holy.
And here you are again, all of you -- you're sixteen and walking her home from the train station, in the fullness of Melbournian summer. You're tired and the cars on the boulevard are swimming in your vision, washing over and past the pavement. The mountains abreast each other and in the small hollow of the valley, you can make out highways, the muted buzzing of vehicles, of trains and trams and other unfamiliar transports to familiar places. You are thinking, "Place your palm over my shoulder and we can face together the broad stretches of land, brave the lacerations of wind or anything else that separates me from you." You are tracing the contours of mountain peaks buried in lowering clouds. And all you can see is a pincushion of starry lights washing over each other and again.
If the Magi could tell you now that you had uncovered the cradle of civilisation that night, discovered that simplest absolute of happiness, what would you do? You would reply that all your life thereafter was built on that knowledge. Your life; the knowledge that happiness is composed only of moments, of memories, and gone. But here are the Magi holding you by the hand, leading you to the Promised Land.
Revenant, you are piecing her now; she is in pieces on ice and elemental gravel. Your unraveled fist holds the debris of her scent, the inward curving of her shoulder, the vulnerable arching of her spine. She’ll come back in fragments, her voice full like fallen plums on loam, the earthiness and the whistle of grasses, the sweetness an ache in your ears. She is growing, she is taking seed, and these are the glory days you will always remember. The early days, when you became a man and she a woman and perhaps the initial bashfulness had an undertone of naked, dying apples. These are the days you will remember, when you were young and her hair was dark water suffocating you. And she will pass like wind, and seasons, and change. And what of you? What is your story, why are you here? One night, in the silence of a drowned room, you will have read to her, “If I should die, think only this of me” – and you will remember it, the deep grooves it cut into her psyche (which in your mind is the psyche of the entire known universe). You will live through the hardened dirt of trenches, the machine-gun fire of unbearable sin. Forced intimacy, the intimacy of unwanted poetry – it’s rape, it’s unforgivable. And you will wonder why it is that the only things you ever remember are the dark dreams, the sordid, furtive secrets. Transgressions that will never be atoned for, all these things you understand. You can still see the look on her face as you hurt her, every night. She was shaking. “If I should die,” you say. Her fingers are cold on your face, your neck. “I want to die,” you say. “Maybe I’m all bad. Maybe there isn’t any goodness left. Maybe you took it all and left me bare.” Barren, bereft, all these lonely words for which she is your antithesis. “Why are you so good?” She took your hand; she wrapped your fingers around her neck. You interpreted it, then, as a sign of absolution, but you know now it was a punishment far greater than any earthly power had right to bestow. She impressed upon you in those spare movements her intransience, her immortality. It was divine and it was the kiss of a sinner. And even now, from every corner of your emptied sky, she is still singing this antidote, this broken angry hymn; in every glance and pulse of you that remembers her, she is permanence stinging, “We’ll pass by all the overhung afternoons, the taste of dust and flesh because when we were together they were one and the same. When the apples are hard acid, we’ll come into our vengeful inheritance.
When bitterness is given shades and colouring, it can be forgiven. To the aesthete, no life is too harsh, too whole, and when everything is beautiful, then there can be no transcendental beauty. Do you see? There is no redeeming grace in this ending. And because of this, you will remember. You will transcend this into another plane, another dimension in a dream we dissolved long ago.
Keep for me now all the memories better lost. Sift out amongst the beauty the ugly ones, the broken ones, the fitful lonely raging ones. Keep this thread of desperation so thinly taut that it cuts your flesh but draws no blood. This is what you have always told me you wanted.
This is what you want.
Keep them and never forget what we once shared.
Keep them and never forget." | | |
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