![]() ![]() I was transfixed by her tumble-jumble of sienna locks, her mock-pout crimsoned lips, tips of teasing nipples half hidden by her face and tresses, the perfumed hint of musk always present in her nearness even though we’d just made love. “Janny used to dig them out for me,” I said aloud, remembering how that on that last night when my foot was bothering me, she took a clean knife and clippers out, came bare to the waist to kneel and at my feet to inspect the objecting toe. I could feel the toes of my phantom foot stretching, could detect the aggravation of another ingrown toenail. off “This is a recording.” and disconnected. Ashes to ashes …I love you.” I started to respond but she cut me. It was ]anny’s voice – a bare whisper in my ear, “I will get you out,” she said, “tonight, you must come to the burial grounds and bring a shovel. I hobbled to catch it, aware of my childish need to retrace steps into the past, while rebuking myself for fear of – what? Unknown phantoms? The sudden buzzing of the telephone jarred me back to reality. Ah, yes “The horn’s last rite” – was what interrupted my sardonic contemplation on that surreal occasion. Such was my line of thinking that first evening, which I remember quite clearly, as if it wasn’t two months ago after all. The pages were stuck with the last ration of blood glue, so there you are. A skeleton’s all bones, anyway, that need scattering. For if she is, you won’t find me untying her. Today, I hop from one to the other, knowing that Janny will never allow herself to be caught that way – a maiden tied to the rails and sleepers by a mustachioed brigand. Simply because I had walked here as a child didn’t entail prints for me to follow …until they were indeed shaped slots in loam leading to the track …that line between scrawny cuttings. It didn’t matter as long as the child returned on single footsteps to its father. The hospital has told me that losing a foot was akin to losing a child and I would suffer …mentally …till it was returned to me. The window’s mirror told me I wept milky tears – for she’d never been there. I was interrupted by Janny not being in her book. Femur, bone and marrow lost, like the membranes of a loved one’s hold and a heart that has no reflections …I became lost in the cryptic present, rubbing the stub of my left foot, meditating as if it was possible to make sense of the mental ichor so neatly typed and never typeset – she had warned me to be careful, yet My GOD, what she had managed to do to us in so short a springtime and did she command the sun to blind me or was it that part about the skeleton that attracted me most? I limped back to bed. Furthermore, each leaf clung, as if adhering to my clean fingers, and every time I would wet my finger, it glued to the page previous (or so it seemed, at the time). On this night, the pages reeked – a sudden and terrible smell that I’d never noticed previously. I remember going back, glass in hand, to leaf through her spiraled book again. ![]() Jarred by the sparkle of passing headlights I opened the door to inhale the scent of moonbeams on roses, the vintages of the season timeless – as if her face below me in our passion, haunting me with that cat-perception angst – Of course, why not? I stood watching the reflections from the highway beyond the motel as I sipped the wine seeing my own face in the mackled glass window. But as for Janny’s book – the only one she ever published – I’d brought it back with me, just as she said I would, someday. That was the only thing I liked, and now this is going down tonight. ![]() Switched on the light, for the skies were dimming beyond the greenshowers of the oaks and maple. ![]() Misfit that I was, the scholar-poet, dubbed a Nerd, estranged. It was twenty years ago, and sometimes you don’t trust your memory, you see. So I brought a bottle of cabernet and took a local motel and waited for the scenes to shift – just to be sure, that is, if that would happen as well. Speculating…Īnd, to be sure it was just as I remembered – and perhaps yet another reason I had left in the first place. I returned to what I called home, once – this terminal town of clattering trains interspersed with tiny communities last spring when I knew the dogwoods would be exploding like cotton balls amidst the green and the “Saved and Safe” smugly secure in their own implacable manner, strolling about on a Saturday to their yard sales, gossiping anon about me, no doubt. Published by PALACE CORBIE 1995 & THE BEST OF PALACE CORBIE 1999 ![]()
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