EXCERPTS

SEVEN COME ELEVEN

The woman turned in his sheets: she did not love the man. He knew she liked to play Waylon on the Wurlitzer, knew she was partial to the sweetness of Gulf Coast oysters and a sharp shot of tequila chased with Shirley Temple, knew she was born in Presidio County but raised in Fort Worth, her uncle a rancher and her father the renter of a ranchstyle house in town, so-called ‘the Pink House’ for its cool primrose blush which was soft as powder at any hour but glowed an almost supernatural shade at twilight, when, in Spring, the whitetailed deer, antlers heaving through the haze of dusk like spirits summoned by the bellowing and reeling of unseen cicadas, would stalk the yard, staring still and silent in a sort of sleepwalking shock, dazed as if by the sight of the dwelling-place, tinted pink from gusts of Mars dust, immaculate despite the passage of eons, of their bygone Creator.

All this the man knew, yet he did not know the name her mother gave her. And for that she could not forgive him. Because if he knew that name——

Well.

So she stood up.

The man slept. The sun spread and the earth separated into scenes: the hummingbird sucking nectar from the flutes of pale yellow flowers, the hummingbird flickering and miraging like something that almost exists, untraceable as the frames-per-second of God’s own mind.

Peach did not leave a note. It was enough that she removed her perfume from his nightstand. The room was a mess. The hummingbird was gone and the yellow flowers overhanging the window were shaking.

The man had taught her how to fiddle when she’d imagined she could love him. But she did not own a fiddle of her own, she owned only her way of walking down the darkened hall, jaunty, tits first, wavy chestnut hair catching the breeze as the screen door swung open and she crossed the dry grass to her powderblue Ford truck, started the engine, clicked a cassette into its silver slot and shot off toward whatever life lay ahead, leaving one last ghost hovering wan and expressionless above his dusty drive, halfway to goodbye.

“CELEBRITY SKIN,” from UNSEX ME HERE

But it had all begun among the high rocky cliffs of Avellino, east of Naples, where her parents were born. A backwards old town that’s often remembered, so many times that the memories are worn. Long before she was a sibyl, Hylonome was the youngest child of a Roman bureaucrat, a former imperial advisor who had retired early, following his majesty’s untimely illness (poisoned, they said, by an unnamed priestess of Aphrodite, his former lover, with powdered milk thistle, dissolved into a goblet of wine); her parents’ ‘one and only son.’

Her mother, Clarissa, spent days alone with her loom, within whose warp and weft she encrypted confessions of her extramarital affairs, maps indicating the precise location of the Garden of the Hesperides or the Siren’s summer house, and recollections of the horse (Hylonome, after whom the sibyl later named herself) whose wildness she had not broken but instead surrendered herself to, as if the ambit of the mare’s gallop, canter or parabolic leap——marked by the regular and restive thud of her hooves along a relentless and obliterative circuit of seaside pasture——were exerting a gravitational spell as irresistible as the radiance of a fairy circle, a kind of event horizon, the ultraviolet limit of a covert dimension (nested within the third and fourth) into whose intertemporal void Clarissa’s mind had, one Autumn afternoon of her late adolescence, suddenly and irrevocably vanished, so that she’d seemed to her sisters to experience even the terror of labor as if she were sleepwalking, screaming from a tomb of dreams, lost in a forest of mirrors among whose depthless proliferating forms the mare Hylonome appeared and disappeared, delirious and whinnying, a wound in her side.

Clarissa had loved that horse. She had required no man, had refused one proposal after another, preferring to spend her days walking beside Hylonome in that pasture among the Amalfi cliffs; lying beside her, the mare’s heavy velvet head at rest in her lap; feeding her cubes of sugar and brushing her with perfumed bristles; or, on rare occasions, years into their intimacy, whenever Hylonome gave some secret signal known only to the two of them, riding her bareback across the sand.

But then, one morning, the mare was gone. The emperor Caligula, while touring the provinces, had happened to pass Hylonome’s meadow, and, mesmerized, watching the mare run her relentless circles, gave the signal for his retinue to halt——because, prior to his expedition, the emperor had personally consulted the Sibylline Oracles (those three volumes of prophetic cause-and-effect composed centuries earlier by the very first sibyl of Cumae, sold to or seized by the emperor Tarquinius Superbus but certainly kept since under State lock-and-key in an armored marble crypt) regarding some or other political equation, the solution to which, quoth the sibyl’s scribbles, was to build a circus in the name of Artemis between the Tyrrhenian Sea and Mount Vesuvius, at the heart of a meadow in the land where the wives of the centaurs are buried. So he’d arranged an expedition across Campania——and interpreting her as some demigod descendent of Chiron, elected to protect the secret cemetery——poached the smoky-blue-haunched mare, transporting her to Rome (bucking, whinnying, with a wound in her side) within the slats of a ruby-studded crate, installing her thereafter in the imperial stables and later, infamously, to a seat in the Roman senate, to whose bewildered officers he counterfeited her as a gelded stallion; his next in line; his one and only son. The mare was drugged daily with herbal sedatives. After Caligula’s assassination, she disappears from the historical record.

Clarissa had not witnessed the event itself. She was off collecting strawberries in a piece of cloth
(so she’d later told her daughter Hylonome, by neither utterance nor singsong but flickering holograph transmitted from the mute smoky refractive depths of her infinity eyes, saying nothing, gazing hard not at memory but at some spectral trace element of Hylonome swirling, galloping, undying, within the pearlescent dust storm lustering on the far horizon of her vision),
an old shred of quilt upon which the goddess Aphrodite herself had once, supposedly, left a lipstick trace. Clarissa was off collecting strawberries in a sacred scrap of fabric, to share with her mare on account of the hot summer day. But when she returned, all she saw were the carriages of the imperial retinue trailing off into the hills. And all she heard were wheels and greaves and whinnying. Whinnying like a horse trapped in a burning barn. Then only wheels, and then just dust. Afterward she bore her life as a broken horse bears the saddle.
Though in months and later months she returned to watch the steel squadrons of the empire construct a circus in the meadow, she remained asleep, unwilling or unable to forfeit her nightmare because it was the nearest reality to her lost paradise. She married the man her parents found for her and gave birth to three children and spent her days at her loom or maintaining their home. Clarissa adored her youngest child, doted even——but with a far-off look in her eyes, an awareness, which never entirely receded, of that pearlescent weather on the horizon of time. And Hylonome, though she sensed its resonance, could not interrupt its broadcast. So she sat and watched her mother at the loom.

THE FIFTH WOUND

Call me Aurora, or call me @silicone_angel. But you have to promise not to fall in love with me. If this is a testament, it is not good news: instead of revelation I give reverb.
I am no longer the author of private letters for the eyes of one man who long ago walked along a dry dusty path and out of sight. I can call him one man or I can call him that fairy, who long ago turned his attention to pomegranates and the rustling of doves and away from my howls, extravagant or wuthering or just plain moon and cactus, it didn’t matter to him, to him it was all just the sound of a dream, gauzy and green as if we were twining one another’s ribs with lilacs, incompatible with what he called waking. Really I wanted making phrases to be a way of making love, wanted words to be organic matter as vital and irreducible as cum, wanted dreams to be fluids coaxed and shot forth from the slime of the slick pink glands where our bodies store and distill their harsh and primordial nectars, involuntary honey, every cellar, every nook and alcove empty in its season, bubbling, spilling, easy, breezy, effortless surfeit of wet and unknown folds (that was the dream) but I was only prepared to sing about the beauty of things, not the way beauty was streaked with hate like meat with blood. I mean that I only wrote about butterflies and nameless gods, I wrote the Dream of a Chaste Sleepwalker soon to be woken by the lips of a fey and mysterious prince...but were I telling that particular story again now, I would write, instead, “the dream of a chaste sleepwalker soon to be woken by the lips of a fey and mysterious prince, who all along had been feeding me tiny wafers of colorful crystal at the suggestion of a spindly sylvan mossdraped hag
and/or [ pixelated clone of Artemis
and/or [ edictclutching longdead emissary from Planet Nine, buried alive in her airless glass spacecraft
and/or [ resurrected pterodactyl named Our Lady of the Goodbye, who––according to sources close to that ne’er-do-well cloutchasing nightingale and/or prickly pear with topaz needles and/or oracular honeyscented transsexual nom-de-plumed Fleck of God––wrote the New Testament in a single night, while snorting a powder made from opals through the tube of a rolled orchid petal,” which is to say I once forbade my sentences the very pleasures that hurt so perfectly heartless when I fainted choking on the silhouette of his cock before waking to see it struck suddenly luminous in a glaze of topaz spit as he slipped it softening from my lips and the sun broke over the desert.
(Remember: Darkness separating from darkness. Nameless forms suggesting names. First the high cliffs, gilded; then the masses of cloud and creosote; the thin shine of a stream, the faroff interstate. Here a spine of desert coral, there a bonedry yucca––and bursting from the brambles, the shivering speck of a sparrow. Leading away from camp: your own footsteps in the dust.)

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