Evidence of exorcism
Ernest Hébert. Ophelia, c. 1910.
In medias res
Part I: Then she, too, Ophelia
I met you to let you slaughter me again and again. --Amelia Rosselli
It is a night for drowning.
She tastes impending doom like iron on her tongue. Every night he loves her, and it is fatal. His flesh beckons her, oceans of blood pounding an improvised primordial invitation. Who is she to resist? Ophelia suffered no different a fate, save hers is in perpetuity. She endures the darkness and familiar hardness of water, always.
This is her his their tragedy: an unholy longing consumated with teeth and nails and bone. The biting and raking and pounding of human flesh--and isn't this how it has always been? The blasphemy of their congress ends with, could only ever be, carnage. It's what she wanted, if not what she wants. Yet the blood sings still, the invitation accepted. And so she dances blindfolded but barefoot and knowing on rusted shards of glass, memory, aching for heading for the water. She succumbs to this midnight disease.
The ritual is borne with anticipation and dread.
(From what grace is she fallen?)
As she waits, this loud princess for that cold prince, she wanders. Alcoholic evenings and laughter and the way it ought to be. She imagines happiness. And she is doubly and somehow less sad for these wisps of fancy? phantasm? invention? memory? She would not begrudge herself this history.
Treading ever closer, closer to the instrument of her little deaths, she thinks of The Other. The other man in her life, in this other lifetime. If I told you this was killing me, would you stop us? Would you end this? Do you see? But she doesn't. He doesn't.
She is Eve in a red dress and stilettos, a sack of ripe apples and a losing deck spilling at her feet. Tucked in the tresses behind her ear, a black rose serpent tormentor whispers her on.
Onward.
To the water's edge.
Ever, always onward. No hesitation, no second thoughts.
She cuts herself on him. Her body and mind bear the brunt of damage. No harm for the heartless.
He has been her secret. When she was found out, when he found her out, rather than fling the seedlings to the virgin sky, she was made to chain (so heavy, those chains) and bury that nascent possibility in the dirt of unremembrance. And each night, each morning, he wishes she would forget. Let dead things lie.
Lies.
She is in the water now, the full length of her.
A snarl of silt and fern and tangled water hyacinth ravels her dark tresses. The stench of mud and rotting vegetation assails her, and it is only in the staccato icy open kisses of the waves that she takes comfort. Insects scuttle whilst in the face of fractured moonlight dust motes fly. Much as she wishes otherwise, the oceans are not hers to command; she cannot reverse the pull of the tides and change victim to victor. Sighing, she relishes the numbness.
Freed from imprisonment by sheer force, the black rose is now in her hand, clasped loosely to her bosom. No language in her heavy lungs and black liquorice flavour of brine in her mouth, she instead gurgles a bloody lullabye wrested from a past.
turpentine turpentine
potion for my valentine
take a ride and take it
in a long black hearse
And she waits.
Part II: Ulysses adrift
In rain your hand slides down my ruined chest.
Sweet, what you want has all been pulled apart
By slavering carnivores. A bloody feast
Has hollowed out what used to be my heart.
...Your fiery eyes look murderously bright,
Beauty, so satisfy your appetite:
Whatever scraps you find still whole, consume.
--Baudelaire (translation by Rachel Hadas), from "Dialogue"
His hand plunges into water, heedless of cold. Finding rough purchase, his fingers twine timorously, cruelly, carelessly, barely apologetically, around the billowing veil obscuring her face. Violently, she is wrenched from whatever sanctuary, whatever tattered sanity, she hoped to salvage.
It is the stench of cigarettes that brings the present reality of this self-made rot and brimstone crashing into splintered little manmade pieces around them. He cradles her head, anchors her to the ritual.
He will not allow her to destroy herself before she can orchestrate his own demise. (What was it she hummed as he approached her, then?) She is his damned siren, and he awaits only her breathing.
Pressed to hers, his mouth pumps sour heat from a mechanical pulley, a Hephaestus come to sear cold marble into ugly flesh. A kiss perverse. She sputters. He curses. They both learn to breathe again, and what they inhale is bitterness itself.
He cannot let go. Neither can she. How many times must she die for this, for them, only to be resurrected?
Oh, but theirs is a dark Venetian drama. All he wants is to find feeling in the jarring of bones and erosion of hips. The cadence of their fucking is hard, until rubble smokes where once were cities: he is all envy and appetite. The world and chaos are made to order again afterwards; a paper moon is constructed only to collapse when the heavy motion of their union resumes, when the doomed reprise begins anew. Exhausted, she knows only the fatigue of crumbling ruins and a decimated moon. Underneath the stickiness of orange, she tastes of marrow, tissue, tendons, frailty. He kisses her all the harder for it. In turn, her mouth is invaded by soot and ash. Still, she cannot resist documenting each dip and nook and cranny of this lie he offers her.
He begins these encounters petrified and bonedry, but she is a farmer of graveyards, she irrigates neediness with the oceans inside her. He wills a new identity to be forged, one which can register pain from fingernails burying into flesh or from the haunting in a pair of eyes. A deal. A past for a past. No questions.
What he remembers most about dying is this: he does not crave it. Yet how can he live like this? And so, for each night he lives, he dies by morning's whiskyed light.
Stars don't quite spin overhead. Where she touches him, he embraces the ice-to-ice burn, pretending to thaw. What does he want? The state of the moon, nothing more. On a night different from the others, she thinks. He reacts. Vertigo and the taste of bile are all she knows, then.
He is never the one to initate these travesties. Tonight, however, is another knot in the grand lie.
She used to wash the sheets more than her own clothing. Why bother to sleep in one's own mess? She wears little and cares less, these nights.
Tonight.
She will keep him safer than a promise.
Part III: Landscape with the fall of Phaedra
She hunts an ending--this was not her story, is not the appropriate fairy tale. She is unwilling to make an existence of waiting; she will not, cannot, sustain herself on the possibility of a "someday." So, she reaches back into her mind, plucks delicately at the tangled chords of there, and grasps at once upon a long, long time ago. She suspends belief. There is nothing left to grieve.
Her eyes are the edge of a knife, her lipstick the colour of blood.
Tonight.
A glint, a flash.
Not teeth.
Now she's got the whole world in her hands and she takes a bite and spits out the seeds, and grins.
Eve is coming apart at the seems. She's been hanging out in too many dives and has had one too many beer-breathed men stumble toward her…as if that’s supposed to be some kind of compliment. Eve is a microcosm of the fall of man, a captain's journal of unmoored spiritual bearings, a woman lost at sea who sort of knows where she's going but hasn't been able to put it into words. Eve is more than the loss of innocence, it's not being able to remember for the time being what innocence feels like. Eve suggests that sometimes the only way to touch hope is to step into a ring and lace up the gloves and put on a blindfold. --Linford Detweiler
Part IV: How John Wayne did it
The precision of our loving is the lethal kind. --Ken Kesey, from "Geometry"
The murdered thing is lust.
Then there is your flare for murder
There's a dagger in the border of your cloak and I suspect a captain's gun
As you put to death suspicions, kindly kill my fears as well
Exorcise and slay the demons one by one
Though I’m usually pacifistic, you are mercifully sadistic
And I didn’t know that murder could be good
But the roses came crimson
Springing from the prison of the floorboards where there once were stains of blood
Does the girl run?
(What the serpent said to Eve.)
---
Ahem. Alternately--and this one is recommended--you can simply listen to "A Perfect Sonnet,"I believe that lovers should be tied together
Thrown into the ocean in the worst of weather
Left there to drown in their innocence
I believe that lovers should be chained together
Thrown into a fire with their songs and letters
Left there to burn in their arrogance
I believe that lovers should be draped in flowers
And laid entwined together on a bed of clover
Left there to sleep
Left there to dream of their happiness
else see the summary I've stitched together, stealing unabashedly from Sam:
Red is my favourite colour. I am building a world for you. When will you let go? And...? Fix the world. It was because of you.
---
*NOTES:
No idea whence the accompanying illustrations were snatched, as my copiously note-full other hard drive has broken.
Yes, I recognise obsessive borrowing. But the words, they already exist for me to not write! Anything italicised but not labelled belongs to Linford Detweiler and/or Karin Bergquist.