Art: Song of the Spirits Over the Waters by Jolanda Richter
THE LAW OF IDENTITY
I.
A man mentions Ursa Major
in his vows.
Even though the night sky does
not represent the future,
but the past.
Though, there are other meanings in a
constellation
that pertain to love.
To believe in them
is to believe in a being who loves us
benevolently.
Like god or
a lover or
the essence of the whole night sky.
I walked along the lake one night
and looked up at the ripples
that I had caused––
I never never laid a finger
on Venus,
on the moon.
(I know these women too well.)
I ran home to report:
“My dear, they’re all gone.
All but Venus and Luna.”
So we made for the lagoon
like conquistadors.
We scooped the water in our hands.
Reached for skating fishfairies.
We released the water
and reborn stars spilled into our laps.
A clever defense,
even more fleeting than the night sky.
A violent deception
or a miscommunication.
like when I said вечная
instead of весна.
II.
If ever I were a blank page
belonging to a man,
then Helios is purely my own invention.
It’s true that I made
the Sun in
my own image.
And it’s true that he is precocious.
He is the one who told me that
the creatures in the woods
can only get you if you
stand too close to the pines in the black forest.
Like the rest of us, he’s
bewitched with Luna.
And once called out to her
for hours.
For now, Helios admires me.
I stroke a mascara wand along my lashes
in the bathroom.
He sits behind me and
I observe two faces––
one is mine,
and the other, mine.
He says, “You look beautiful.”
But The Sun is omnipresent
and often calls for me whenever
he is not sleeping.
Others are waiting for me.
Men who let me escape myself
because
I did not make them in my own image.
I love The Sun
because he is the circle––
which
The Greeks
believed represented divinity.
A dance.
A loop.
An ecstatic, quintessence––
so certain that it
is perhaps foreboding.
(Like the ring I stopped wearing.)
We read together,
Helios and I.
He counts the silvers in my hair.
His pupils absorb the light
that he pours over me.
Perhaps we are both narcissists.
If I am to belong to anyone,
I am fated to be owned by him,
which only frightens me
some of the time.
We know that The Sun does not
exist to illume,
but to cast shadows
which are the nots and
the antis and
the nihilists’ delights.
The light is an inquiry of Being.
III.
The only other man I’ve loved cannot
see Ursa Major
in the Southern Hemisphere.
(And I have never seen the Southern Crux,
which is familiar to him.
We observe very different pasts.)
I left a letter in the typewriter for him:
“This is what the Greeks meant by Kairos”
Even though it all began as a sympathy fuck.
I am Hume’s blank page,
the subject of authorial indecision.
Transformed by a language only he speaks.
Hume and I often discuss language and
its euphony. What are our favorite words.
“”I hope you like it” is one of the prettiest phrases.”
I’m not allowed to say Cellar Door,
is my bad joke,
but “suffer”––
In his accent, suff-ah.
(Because one shouldn’t growl when
one speaks.)
A symmetrical structure:
two towers at the center, a vowel on each side,
consonants for bookends.
We share the quiet, which is not heavy.
(With Hume, there is only buoyancy.)
Even the mirror is less daunting in his room.
Everything’s very honest, exposed: the brick, the piping, the wooden beams––
I reveal all of my secrets here.
We are outside of time.
But like childhood clubhouses,
there are a list of rules upon entrance,
an oath, and a secret password.
The oath is a silent understanding, never
formally articulated. The rules: have all been broken
by now.
thus,
Warning people who are in the midst of a love affair
is futile. Grief is
the result of an elation that has subsided.
Dread is all but forgotten to those who are happy.
Which is good because when the dread
slips under the fingernails, and
glides up along your wrists and
weaves through your ribs, down your throat and
settles in your trunk…
while you endure this grief,
joy becomes an incomprehensible fiction.
(This is what one risks with Hume.)
The settling grief is steeping and your soul
darkens the longer it steeps so
now there’s no outpouring or diluting it.
Grief is monochromatic.
Grief can stagnate and thicken into a grease-like consistency that
adheres to your parts. You are left with this ever-steeping, ever-darkening.
The only reprieve are the few, contrasting kaleidoscopic
images (and even those are fleeting and deranging).
One of which:
we shared a steaming bath in the middle of February and he, the philosopher, said, “Do you know the story of Achilles?” And as he proceeded to tell of a mathematician who drew circles in the sand unto his last breath, I, the amateur who knows nothing in comparison, was polite enough not to correct him––
It was not Achilles, it was Archimedes.
When the blood runs down the legs, from
between them, that is how you know you’re a woman.
In the shower, the mind thinks this as the body feels a slight pain
in the lower stomach and
the water at the feet,
now blush-colored,
pools around the toes.
So what remained of the self tried to define
what was vanishing
and so listed “I am”:
needed,
desired
trapped,
here.
I am here. I am. The list of what I am is shorter than what I am not. I am not––a consoling phrase. I am not. I can not. And I can not whenever I want to not. To not, to be not, is
simplicity.
All of these men accuse the not-me of making it rain too often. They say winter will never end if she doesn’t get out of bed. like Demeter. like Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, dragged to hell. Hades saw the blood trickling down the leg and fled. The joke of the misogynist––she bleeds and doesn’t die.
Women’s trickery,
fucking with the gods,
pretending to be immortal.
But heaven and hell are the same––
That вечная I had mentioned
could only be perdition.
