Collaboration Incidents
1.
Beatriz languishes in the sagging sleeping dripping air of Clair de Lune. What else. Claude is gay, Beatriz is gay, Dante is gay (still doesn’t know it, why doesn’t he know it) —
definitely gay
gay as gay speech
gay as gay liquor
gay as a dream (any dream —.:
A couch with a gay gray fleece cover, and a pile of cherries in a bowl. A cheap wooden coffee table. A little rug, reddish, tired and soft—something like loved, for an object. Beatriz leans on her elbow. She may be a princess of olden times. This wealth, it rains. This wealth, insanity. Dante would covet and look down on her, her scene. And covet.
Her eyes droop. Around her, Dante is pressurized and absent.
Though she is at no risk of sadness. The cherries.
When Debussy calls, after his piano, his ego is eager. He is laughing, lightly. He doesn’t want to fuck. He wants to touch her feet. Debussy, in love, behaves like an Aries, though he paints like a Pisces. In truth, his Sun is in Leo and his Moon in Cancer. His color is blue or red (not too bright), his stone the opal, his day is Friday, his professions to do with beauty, luxury. His reputation, terrible.
Beatriz could roll her eyes — the feet? really? — what a cliché, but who says no to Debussy?
Her feet could be the next Clair de lune.
2.
Somewhere in Europe, Debussy is quoting Wilco. Lying on his back in the dust of the red velvet and brocaded train compartment, in darkness and in sunlight: simultaneous.
I’d like to lay, he hums, but doesn’t know the words yet. California, California stars. What is California? Unconcerned with the correctness, he ignores it until it turns into another song in him, a song he was previously writing — a sound no one had ever heard before, which is Debussy doing Wilco.
Wilco is not dead, nor alive yet, and Debussy is both alive and dead, so something must filter down or up from the heavens, and a new type of celestial cover is birthed by a lucky child in Minnesota, lying on her back in an empty field, empty from her body in just the ripe moment — and so subsequently finds her musical internet fame on the early side of life. The child, though indebted to Debussy, will not learn of Debussy for another seven years. Wilco, too, before her time.
Beatriz and Debussy toured all through Western Europe — Berlin, Austria, a stop in Vienna and Salzburg, the Czech Republic, Oslo, until finally home to France.
In the garden, Beatriz ordered tea from the spectral flowers employed by Claude. Children flung themselves into the water and the bees clung to their pollen, as though the music he was writing in the conservatory was so sweet it might steal everything away.
Beatriz thought she might write poems, but the air was too honeyed already; the poem was the life itself, and she wouldn’t kill it by writing it down; she wouldn’t take it away. Instead, she read half-heartedly in the lawn of wildflowers, and waited for the children to come pulling on her arms and laughing, flinging her book away from her to spin her into games, which they did every day; no failures.
No failures in this poem — this living, breathing creature thing, the life itself strumming the threads of air that he had put there for her —
Later, she would rest on Claude’s tummy, and they would speak softly, or not at all. Lavender salts in their bath. Four yellow candles he had chosen for no reason that she knew.
3.
Paradise was found then,
but not by Milton.
Light came, noisily. What a clown, this john —
who let him in?
Light descanted hard on the horizon. This was the sunset mapping onto the sunrise, and then
tomorrow, the same thing backwards; The variant Paradises retrofitted,
waiting for their map,
and Beatriz had begun to see through the limits of the container.
Sometimes a wheel spun light in the air wherever she looked, and she could go into infinity and get anything out.
She did cabrioles, why
not, while they were waiting:
Even time is queer, said the new Dante, from his dimension, wherever. She didn’t answer, figured he could hear her nodding. If he wanted to —
This is taking too long, spoke
A Paradise, and made a change.
And Dante longed for her, still — she could feel it, though she wouldn’t encourage his return to her own Paradise. She would wish him instead to find his own. It no longer exhausted her to think of him. She only did it rarely,
in deference to
one of the ones
from France.
There was a song out there that had never murdered anybody,
but who wanted to listen to that.
one of the ones —,
a daughter
Once, Beatriz had loved. Now she was transcended by the Paradise she privileged into an action that humans could not name. It made her whitehot, and everybody saw it. They called her a saint when she was out of the room. What a shit, they said. That saint.
She said to herself, I know they say that. I am not — only I’ve hacked a pervasive metaphysical usefulness and it is true I do a good job.
And the johns,
even Milton,
queried her for light.
* * * * *
Liz Phair, unexiled
- She did it herself (photo credit: her other self).
2.
The barn door, the wood is stacked, the places that look like my childhood, my negotiable self, your first ax, the vineyard, my fixed self, places that look like your childhood, horses hiding in the barn, horses running away, the purple hills, the composting vines, the sumac unbroken, the sumac cut down, places that smell like
a childhood, the bobcat, the madness I lost, the tunnels in air, the madness I found, desires I am born of, the hedges, hedges, hive, the tunnels in the ground, the rodents, backwash, flooded field, the invisible plain, the hives, the honey, thieves — the desires I am made of, desires I have eaten, the topographical plateau, the imagined day, the sticks, the bones, the tall grass, the neighborless neighbors — the boys that grew to boys, the boys that grew to girls, the girls that grew to dimes; the girls that grew to—
ticks, composted vines, the window, my lost self, the window, the barn door, my found self, the window, the golden hills, your other self, the photo credits
unreported, time in reverse, the green hills, red hills, window, barn door, the window, his first ax, the composted vines —
my children hiding, children running away, the window, my hidden self, the bear cubs eating in the garden, nothing to do, his selfless self, the blue hills, my butchered lies, his rigid self, the orange hills, my soft heart, his kindness, his shirts, my coats, the wood is stacked, the barn door, the places that look like his childhood, his negotiable self, the vineyard, my bear cubs, his foals, my first ax, my fixed self, the window, our unbroken horses, the window, their found selves, the window, places that look like their childhood, their lost selves, the vine grafts, composting vines, the wine; the wine reversed; their hungry selves, their windows, their hallways, their photo credits
unreported, their house plants, other selves, their paper stacks, their gardens, fathers, mothers, the wood is stacked, the barn door, my first self, his last self, my body, our negotiable self, my tall self, his mind.