Chapter 57
The looping ribbon of memory is coiling itself around you,
drawing closer and closer and ever more pressing until it
feels like a woman's warm hand resting on your cheek.
What is thy beloved more than another beloved? My beloved
is unto me as a bundle of myrrh. Honey and
milk are under her tongue. Her lips are like a
thread of scarlet and her mouth is comely. The joints
of her thighs are like jewels. Her belly is like
a heap of wheat set about with lilies. And I
will make mention of my love more than of wine.
Let your heart make a recording of all the lovelinesses
that she has given you, and let it play them
back to you slowly, and let the needle stick occasionally
so that you may hear her say hello again and
again and again and touch your name to her lips.
Always she is waiting for your mind. Always your thoughts
run up the same path and burst through the same
door. Always at the end of thinking her soft fingers
smooth away distraction and the white image of her face
is a cushion for your weariness. How much of hell
you have put away to turn to her. How much
of desolation and sorrow and loneliness she helped
mmmyou overcome.
Do you remember the last time you saw her on
that final furlough when you didn't have time to tell
her that you would be arriving, and you let yourself
into the house and you sat there waiting like an
empty glass for the bright, bubbly champagne of her coming?
Do you remember the hat she wore and the way
her hair was combed and how the room seemed to
fill up when she entered it, and the look in
her eyes when she saw you and how you had
to tell her to go wipe her face because her
soul was smeared all over it? Do you remember the
thousand little fires you lit each day and how one
by one they were themselves consumed until all you had
left was a special portion of their brilliance for nightly
candles that would always burn in far-flung windows? Do you
remember that last parting at the station when you tried
to tell her what you didn't know and you couldn't
level your gaze to hers because it would have meant
talking and you couldn't talk because it would have meant
saying goodbye, and so you held her hand and said
that you were certainly glad it had been nice weather?
Well, here is a nice new day fresh from the
dawn's opaque wrapping paper and the sunlight is getting
mmmstronger
and you are beginning to feel its intensity. The locale
has shifted, but it is the same sun rising from
the same direction and depositing the same coin of gold
in the same diurnal slot. She has seen this sun
in the east and she has spoken to it and
it is carrying her message to you and it drops
it down through the trees on its usual journey westward.
So take this bit of luminousness that has fallen from
the sky, and hold it in your hands and lift
it up to your face and drink of it with
your lips until you can't hold any more and it
drips down your chin. This is the glad, enduring flame
you didn't have time to kindle, the warmth that merges
the molten tallow of your separate tapers in bright foreverness.
And you blink because her eyes are in every ray.
* * *
