Musings and Conjecture

V. kiru    
   
over my sandals    
   
waters carry severed reeds    
   
through a quiet hour    
   
..    
   
I receive a parcel in the mail from my first lover, twenty years to the day after our time together. She has wanted me to write an opera, and here was my research material: Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, Simon Boccanegra and Otello, Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripedes’ Alcestis, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, and Aeschylus’ Persians. I am familiar with a few, though it has been some years.    
   
I begin looking through the materials after dinner with a glass of red. I think of our first night together.    
   
Years.    
   
I’ve lost much weight. Shirts that fit me well several months ago now look like a house dress. Digging in the forgotten bottoms of long unopened drawers for something to wear. Standing before the mirror, trimming my beard, the hairs a mixture of true blacks and shades of gray. Don a white t-shirt embossed with a flower a girl I once knew had made for me, her signature within the long, green stem. Don an old pair of denims.    
   
Sunlight hits me like a blast furnace. Dark glasses shield my eyes, but fail to suffice. A hand flies up, unconsciously. Reach into my pocket, produce a quarter and flip it off my thumb. Up, up, up it goes, light glinting off its swiftly oscillating surfaces.    
   
..    
   
IV. juyo    
   
on a calm morning    
   
beyond the bouts of night storms    
   
her silent eyes speak    
   
..    
   
I do bicep curls, listening to Ludwig Van, watching the storm pound out its wrath against the window. I close my eyes, go into the darkness behind the lids, get lost in the smooth repetitions and automatic changes of grip as I move into tricep curls, one arm working, one fist pressed into the small of my back. Toss the 25lb weight in the air in front of me and catch with the other hand. Reminds me of a trapeze act. Let the music fill me with sightless colors, carry and dash my aged heart upon its waves.    
   
I finish Murakami through the afternoon, feel him speaking from my soul, like a second head upon my shoulders, his characters like a second self, glimpsed from an alternate dimension through an augur’s pool. Head out to the Library just as a torrential rainstorm begins to blast through the neighborhood. I’ve always been like this. When it strikes me to do something, I do it, come fresh hell or howling water.    
   
Perhaps it’s something in my Nordic blood, perhaps it’s a commonality, but I have always loved storms. Loved to clash with them, embrace them in stark nudity, with the intimate violence of lovemaking. The immense energy inspiring a tinge of delicious fear. I enjoy feeling the car shove its way through the turbulent air, displace the groundwater, snaking around heavier deposits along the curbs.    
   
Sitting at a nearby stoplight, wind rocking the car on its suspension like one of those toy horses atop a coiled spring, I had straddled in my youth. Everything has been washed grey. Trees in the distance are silhouettes, their limbs swaying as if to some soft melody. I think of David.    
   
David.    
   
It’s been one year, five months and three weeks, since you left us. I talk to him as I drive. I talk to him less often, as time goes by. I feel a momentary pang, over this. I feel another as it settles in with grim, certain physics, that this is the natural progression. All that is past fades. I remember why I despise cemeteries. How unnatural it is, how pointless, to leave carven stones on earth above dispersing organic matter. Inadequate and feeble as my hand raised to deny the sun.    
   
I wonder if he can feel the rain. Perhaps he feels it at much greater depth than us, now.    
   
..    
   
III. morae    
   
two held breaths - - - hands pressed to her sternum    
   
reaching down - - - life pours out    
    
..    
   
Hot and heavy, almost immediately after my arrival. Her face against the wall, in the entranceway to her apartment, my hands cupping her throat, reaching underneath her clothing, gripping her thighs, fingers reaching into her soaking wet mound. She moans, I breathe into her neck, teeth trail the nape, the flesh of her ear. After a short while, she calls an audible and says we should get pizza. We part, adjust our clothing, allow our blood to cool and get pizza, we do.    
   
I have to say, Philadelphia makes some damn fine pizza.    
   
I remember us playing Scrabble, late into the evening, until she removed her blouse, baring her breast. All the fire that had suffused us earlier, rushing to the surface. Overwhelmed by that feeling of heat, of slick walls, crushing down.    
   
Where late night melts with a barely perceptible hiss into early morning, the nearby train station rattles the walls. I wake in a half conscious haze of renewed lust. Kiss her. Enter her. She responds silently. Nothing is said in that lovemaking. It consumes us and passes, like a bout of fever, like a summer storm. We close our arms about each other. Slumber quietly closes its warm dark arms around us both.    
   
..    
   
II. ataru    
   
still under her skin    
   
invisible radiance    
   
from the crisis core    
   
..    
   
This bedraggled man was buying peanut butter, bread, two six packs and a dozen cans of tuna. I knew immediately what I was looking at, but the cashier, gregarious in her boredom, says, “Boy, you sure like tuna fish.”    
   
And in the genial but somewhat hollow tone of someone whom life had flung about in the beating sack, he calmly says, “That's for my kitty cat.” Buying more food for his cat than himself, on his food stamps. Beers because that's what he does, that's his coping mechanism, that’s the sea he drowns his soul in, his dreams lying still at the bottom, dark and heavy, silent as gravestones. His former loves become avatars, rising with a pang of heartache, having become otherworldly in their spectral visitations. Peanut butter to live. Maybe living just to feed his cat.    
   
I think of what it is I have lived for. Of repetitions of comfortable past times. Of lovers I have had, always brief encounters. I think of women comfortable to be nude on bottom, yet wishing to keep on their bra. There must be something particularly vulnerable, private, about the breast.    
   
She reveals each breast, carefully, one at a time, to my kisses. I gently suckle the erect nipple, run my tongue around in circles, kissing the goosed flesh at the perimeter of the dark corona. Lifting my face away, she replaced it beneath the black mesh and lace, before exposing the other. Each a perfect mirror, bearing a scar from her augmentation surgery.    
   
She is self-conscious of the scars, which I trace with my fingertip, my tongue, and slowly dot with kisses. She sighs, eyes closing, she’s opening and the bra begins to slip away, down her stomach, forgotten. The explorations of my mouth, back and forth across these silently heaving mounds, of my hands, mirrored also.    
   
..    
   
I. kireji    
   
through my open hands    
   
time and wind still dance and spring    
   
across my fingers    
   
..    
   
I’ve lost so much more than weight. I drive through the black night sea, unmoored by a single star. The fingernail moon is keen as a razor blade, a rift in an impenetrable wall of darkness, I will never have the strength, never have the wings to reach.    
   
My eyes ineffectually seek to capture the dawn. They watch the rising colors, with obtuse, animal intensity. Watch the glory of the burning god, but are forced to avert from its gaze, and soon, to forget.    
   
An unrealized grief lay somewhere within, a great, solid glacier of smooth, pure ice. Without a reference point, without a connecting reality to give it measure and depth, it remains, somewhere within, somewhere unreachable.    
   
My weeping is hollow, cold tears leak by sheer physical force, and my fingers wrench at intangible specters that drift about, oblivious to their having been torn from me, camouflaged in cruelly perfect atmospherically aligned mists, rising invisibly into the air about my shoulders.    
   
The future stretches a wall of earth before my feet, my fingers, daring me to climb, to reach, to crawl, but in truth, unconcerned whether I rise, for a time, or rot in place.    
   
Ink blots contemporaneously relevant numbers to current tasks on off white sheaves. Wind gusts, rain falls, walls heave. All things settle into their comfortable static void.    
   
Birds call the all clear, searching upturned earth for wriggling, corpulent worms. For the next labor and inadequate feast.    
   
Overhead, that coin still cutting the air, throwing off dazzling retorts of pirouetting sunlight.    
   
..    
   
Musings and Conjecture:    
A countdown    
By    
Daniel Christensen    
Writing as    
R Sculptoris