"Lie With Me"*

"You must enter it like soft silk" – Deb Stone

When you watch the sky molt, when eyes
turn inside out, from blue to red, and orange
to green you carefully open the doors to allow
the wind to pass through your house
to what you need at that moment. You are
distraught, damaged and weak from news
anticipated from the first day you had met him.

You are obsessed with that sensation completed
and breath exposed more naked to yourself
than any mirror. Nothing else works.

Everything you touch afterwards will be softer
than hard memory. You will not know how
to watch her tumble over your sheets,
carefully pirouette into the limber arms
of his death made raw. Your lips tremble
with that half open glance practiced
for hours when you were twelve.

You will dance your hips, raise them, enter the
vestibule with him like soft silk and resist
all temptation to think about him with her.
Yet, you love her, and surprised and
excited by that you want him to yourself?
"Why am I so selfish?" Is it possible to share
that pitch of the mind where the drive
to stiff legs, stomach, and back curled
before the tumble over Niagara Falls?

Was he worthless glass beads in bread?
Why does he forsake her terrors and replace
what she had dreamed? He throws away her hands.
She captures his mirrors and twinned they become
silk warmed into a burlesque of one become one
becomes two -- a decorative quartz jewel
worth very little but its loss sets off alarms,
twists dangerous thighs. You will join to her,
and her darkest hair will dress his fingers.
Death cannot speak today. It has lost
the trap door where history falls, dissolves --
its magnitude a Richter 10 earthquake.

 

*****

Deb's first line: "You must enter it like soft silk" & 2005 Toronto Film Festival: "Lie With Me" Screenplay: Tamara Faith Berger, Clement Virgo, based on the novel by Berger A Clement-Virgo Film Principals: Lauren Lee Smith and David Balfour.

 
4/8/06