i know this irony. of speaking of writing of other lovers in a different hallway.
paper is so endearing. even my dad agrees.
oh the cuckoo
she's a pretty bird
she wobbles when she flies
she don't ever drink water
she only drink wine
school was good today. / incoming nervousness for next week too.
/
and might as well do this now; my posts are not cohesive anymore, if they ever were. my brain is not, either.
All that evening and late into the morning hours Patrick tried to seduce Clara Dickens and then the next day when he was exhausted she seduced him.
...
-You think I am the line to him, don't you? You think that he must have left his shadow on me.
He couldn't talk back against her beauty. He noticed a fragment of water under her eyelid, a sun tear she was unaware of.
...
At that hour he did not think of seduction. He was exhausted by all their conversations the previous night on her porch overlooking Broadway Street. They had been outrageous and flamboyant in each other's company, their arguments like duets. He normally took months to approach someone, and at the slightest rejection he would turn and never go back. But he argued just so they could remain together on that porch deep in moonlight, half-laughing at the other's ploys. She wouldn't let him kiss her or hold her standing up--didn't want all of their bodies touching, that possibility.
...
It was two in the morning. She sat half facing him, her feet already out of their shoes, one knee pointed towards him by the gear-shift. She let him kiss her goodnight and he sat there for a moment gazing at her face patterned by streelight.
He got out and closed the door too energetically and realized after he had taken three steps how that had sounded. He turned back.
-That wasn't a slam.
-I know.
She was sitting there very alone, still, looking towards the seat he had left, her head down.
-Goodnight.
-Goodnight, Patrick.
...
His room when they got there was full of bright daylight and traffic noises came through the open window. They slept almost immediately, holding each other's hands.
When he woke, her eyes were studying him. Only her dark neck and face were visible. He felt awkward, having slept in his clothes.
-Hello.
-Sing to me, she murmured.
-What?
-I want it formal. Can you sing?
She smiled and he moved across the bed to her softness.
After they had made love he brought his pillow as close as he could for comfortable focus and gazed at her. When he woke she was gone, there was no answer on her telephone. He came back to bed and inhaled whatever perfume there was left on the pillow.
...
Later that night they lay on the bed by the three windows, barely dressed. He liked to sleep separate, in his own world, but with her he kept waking, reaching to hold her flesh against him. During the night Clara turned slowly like something on the floor of the ocean. She would put more and more clothes on in the darkness. She was always cold at night, in this room of the sea.
-You awake?
-What time is it? she said.
-Still night.
-Ahh.
-I love you. Were you ever in love? Apart from Ambrose.
-Yeah.
He was put off by her casual admission.
-I fell in love with a guy named Stump Jones when I was sixteen.
-Stump!
-There was a problem with the name.
-I'll say.
-Goodnight, Patrick, I'm sleepy.
-Hey!
He got up and strolled around the farmhouse happier and more at ease than he had ever been. She was already back in deep sleep, snoring, wearing one of his shirts to keep warm. A smile on her face. Clara the smirker. He wanted to get hold of Stump Jones and beat the hell out of him. Sixteen! Where had he been at sixteen? She had been Small's lover, Stump's lover, and who else? He found himself at this hour in the spell of her body, within the complex architecture of her past.
...
Love was like childhood for him. It opened him up, he was silly and relaxed.
...
-Come here, I want you to see this.
She looked at the window and then back at him, refusing the speak.
-He wants you with all your clothes off.
-It's three in the morning, Patrick, you're supposed to be asleep. You're supposed to be searching for my beloved. (Beloved! He grinned.) Do you want to make love, is that it?
-It's a tree frog!
-A tree frog in the moonlight is not rare.
-Yes it is, they only come out during the day. He wants to consider your thorax, your abdomen.
-Is this some kind of Bolshevik gesture?
She unbuttoned the shirt, stood between him and the glass.
-Tomorrow night he'll probably bring his pals to see you. Some places call them bell frogs. When they get excited they make a sound like a bell. Sometimes they bark like dogs.
She leaned forward and put her mouth to the green belly against the glass and kissed it.
...
The next day they drove along the country roads in her Packard. He watched her as she spoke of the Wheeler Needle Works where her father had worked, the Medusa factory by the railway.
-This is the tour of my teenage life, Patrick. I'll show you where I almost got seduced.
-The crucial years.
-Yes.
He loved the eroticism of her history, the knowledge of where she sat in schoolrooms, her favourite brand of pencil at the age of nine. Details flooded his heart. Clara said once, "When I know a man well socially, the only way I'll ever get to know him better will be to sleep with him." Seduction was the natural progression of curiosity. And during these days he found he had become interested only in her, her childhood, her radio work, this landscape in which she had grown up. He no longer wanted Small, he wanted to exorcise Small from Clara's mind.
It was raining and they couldn't get out of the car. She rolled down the window.
-This is where I used to bury my lunch.
Taking his pocket handkerchief, she wet a corner with her tongue.
-You've got mud on you, she said, rubbing his forehead.
All these gestures removed place, country, everything. He felt he had to come back to the world.
-Tell me something about Ambrose quickly.
-Whenever he lied his voice became quiet and reasonable.
-What else.
-We used to fuck on the Cayuga.
-The day ferry? Jesus, on the Cayuga?
He was drawing out her history with Small, a splinter from a lady's palm. He was constantly appalled.
from In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
...i miss adam from it, because he never did explain to me the history of the "-" quote/dialogue style. he was an avid employer of it, from cohen no doubt, and so's beth nugent. i meant to ask but never did, where it comes from, the thinking behind it...so i will wonder myself.
there's more, from before too. a nun falling...wait. here, a night ago i think:
j (8:53 PM): Do you like ice skating? I do.
j (8:53 PM): What problem?
m (8:53 PM): maybe it's homesickness.
:D i just asked someone if they did, last night!
j (8:53 PM): World peace?
m (8:53 PM): 'cause i have good memories of trying (laugh)
he said he never got the hang of ice skating.
m (8:54 PM): the book i'm rereading right now mentions older men taking breaks from hard labor of building a bridge in winter, by ice skating on old knives.
...
m (8:58 PM): the book right now is. one man, a really great catlike man, who leaps around the bridge and does dangerous stuff no one worker will do, because he knows the territory blindfolded, leverages and things, he catches a falling nun and saves her from death. now it's about absence and courtship. it's so great. the idea of absent courtship. the thoughts and daydreams as the real.
m (8:59 PM): there's always that thing poets get hung up about. the seduction of nuns and priests.
m (9:00 PM): there's even some poem i remember, titled something like how to write poetry and one step is to seduce a priest.
m (9:00 PM): flirting with devotion, i guess.
sufiswirl (9:00 PM): :)
j (9:00 PM): As in that Hal Hartley movie.
j (9:00 PM): oh.
m (9:00 PM): haha
j (9:00 PM): That reminds me.
m (9:00 PM): i'd forgotten.
yeah. and then later, this morning actually, i was thinking maybe it's the bluntness that's attractive, the outright brave seeminglyunwavering hope. the allowance for others to generalize about your naivete. when really you have hope. of being that open to it, and to the criticism attached to that today.
and the picture of it, of being titled, official, badged and open in your desire your declaration to be clean, to aspire to be clean, to be pure of heart or try, try, saying out loud without euphemism (yes) "i want to be closer to this...holy, i wish i was holy, i want to be holy." mm. to not hide in under the rug of more common, greater occupations which really just want the same thing but translated to skyscrapers and chemical breakthroughs and genetic engineering and political science and philosophical essays. (sometimes .to me. i see these all as the same thing. in that sense...)
/
catching.
oh the cuckoo
she's a pretty bird
she wobbles when she flies
she don't ever drink water
she only drink wine
school was good today. / incoming nervousness for next week too.
/
and might as well do this now; my posts are not cohesive anymore, if they ever were. my brain is not, either.
All that evening and late into the morning hours Patrick tried to seduce Clara Dickens and then the next day when he was exhausted she seduced him.
...
-You think I am the line to him, don't you? You think that he must have left his shadow on me.
He couldn't talk back against her beauty. He noticed a fragment of water under her eyelid, a sun tear she was unaware of.
...
At that hour he did not think of seduction. He was exhausted by all their conversations the previous night on her porch overlooking Broadway Street. They had been outrageous and flamboyant in each other's company, their arguments like duets. He normally took months to approach someone, and at the slightest rejection he would turn and never go back. But he argued just so they could remain together on that porch deep in moonlight, half-laughing at the other's ploys. She wouldn't let him kiss her or hold her standing up--didn't want all of their bodies touching, that possibility.
...
It was two in the morning. She sat half facing him, her feet already out of their shoes, one knee pointed towards him by the gear-shift. She let him kiss her goodnight and he sat there for a moment gazing at her face patterned by streelight.
He got out and closed the door too energetically and realized after he had taken three steps how that had sounded. He turned back.
-That wasn't a slam.
-I know.
She was sitting there very alone, still, looking towards the seat he had left, her head down.
-Goodnight.
-Goodnight, Patrick.
...
His room when they got there was full of bright daylight and traffic noises came through the open window. They slept almost immediately, holding each other's hands.
When he woke, her eyes were studying him. Only her dark neck and face were visible. He felt awkward, having slept in his clothes.
-Hello.
-Sing to me, she murmured.
-What?
-I want it formal. Can you sing?
She smiled and he moved across the bed to her softness.
After they had made love he brought his pillow as close as he could for comfortable focus and gazed at her. When he woke she was gone, there was no answer on her telephone. He came back to bed and inhaled whatever perfume there was left on the pillow.
...
Later that night they lay on the bed by the three windows, barely dressed. He liked to sleep separate, in his own world, but with her he kept waking, reaching to hold her flesh against him. During the night Clara turned slowly like something on the floor of the ocean. She would put more and more clothes on in the darkness. She was always cold at night, in this room of the sea.
-You awake?
-What time is it? she said.
-Still night.
-Ahh.
-I love you. Were you ever in love? Apart from Ambrose.
-Yeah.
He was put off by her casual admission.
-I fell in love with a guy named Stump Jones when I was sixteen.
-Stump!
-There was a problem with the name.
-I'll say.
-Goodnight, Patrick, I'm sleepy.
-Hey!
He got up and strolled around the farmhouse happier and more at ease than he had ever been. She was already back in deep sleep, snoring, wearing one of his shirts to keep warm. A smile on her face. Clara the smirker. He wanted to get hold of Stump Jones and beat the hell out of him. Sixteen! Where had he been at sixteen? She had been Small's lover, Stump's lover, and who else? He found himself at this hour in the spell of her body, within the complex architecture of her past.
...
Love was like childhood for him. It opened him up, he was silly and relaxed.
...
-Come here, I want you to see this.
She looked at the window and then back at him, refusing the speak.
-He wants you with all your clothes off.
-It's three in the morning, Patrick, you're supposed to be asleep. You're supposed to be searching for my beloved. (Beloved! He grinned.) Do you want to make love, is that it?
-It's a tree frog!
-A tree frog in the moonlight is not rare.
-Yes it is, they only come out during the day. He wants to consider your thorax, your abdomen.
-Is this some kind of Bolshevik gesture?
She unbuttoned the shirt, stood between him and the glass.
-Tomorrow night he'll probably bring his pals to see you. Some places call them bell frogs. When they get excited they make a sound like a bell. Sometimes they bark like dogs.
She leaned forward and put her mouth to the green belly against the glass and kissed it.
...
The next day they drove along the country roads in her Packard. He watched her as she spoke of the Wheeler Needle Works where her father had worked, the Medusa factory by the railway.
-This is the tour of my teenage life, Patrick. I'll show you where I almost got seduced.
-The crucial years.
-Yes.
He loved the eroticism of her history, the knowledge of where she sat in schoolrooms, her favourite brand of pencil at the age of nine. Details flooded his heart. Clara said once, "When I know a man well socially, the only way I'll ever get to know him better will be to sleep with him." Seduction was the natural progression of curiosity. And during these days he found he had become interested only in her, her childhood, her radio work, this landscape in which she had grown up. He no longer wanted Small, he wanted to exorcise Small from Clara's mind.
It was raining and they couldn't get out of the car. She rolled down the window.
-This is where I used to bury my lunch.
Taking his pocket handkerchief, she wet a corner with her tongue.
-You've got mud on you, she said, rubbing his forehead.
All these gestures removed place, country, everything. He felt he had to come back to the world.
-Tell me something about Ambrose quickly.
-Whenever he lied his voice became quiet and reasonable.
-What else.
-We used to fuck on the Cayuga.
-The day ferry? Jesus, on the Cayuga?
He was drawing out her history with Small, a splinter from a lady's palm. He was constantly appalled.
from In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
...i miss adam from it, because he never did explain to me the history of the "-" quote/dialogue style. he was an avid employer of it, from cohen no doubt, and so's beth nugent. i meant to ask but never did, where it comes from, the thinking behind it...so i will wonder myself.
there's more, from before too. a nun falling...wait. here, a night ago i think:
j (8:53 PM): Do you like ice skating? I do.
j (8:53 PM): What problem?
m (8:53 PM): maybe it's homesickness.
:D i just asked someone if they did, last night!
j (8:53 PM): World peace?
m (8:53 PM): 'cause i have good memories of trying (laugh)
he said he never got the hang of ice skating.
m (8:54 PM): the book i'm rereading right now mentions older men taking breaks from hard labor of building a bridge in winter, by ice skating on old knives.
...
m (8:58 PM): the book right now is. one man, a really great catlike man, who leaps around the bridge and does dangerous stuff no one worker will do, because he knows the territory blindfolded, leverages and things, he catches a falling nun and saves her from death. now it's about absence and courtship. it's so great. the idea of absent courtship. the thoughts and daydreams as the real.
m (8:59 PM): there's always that thing poets get hung up about. the seduction of nuns and priests.
m (9:00 PM): there's even some poem i remember, titled something like how to write poetry and one step is to seduce a priest.
m (9:00 PM): flirting with devotion, i guess.
sufiswirl (9:00 PM): :)
j (9:00 PM): As in that Hal Hartley movie.
j (9:00 PM): oh.
m (9:00 PM): haha
j (9:00 PM): That reminds me.
m (9:00 PM): i'd forgotten.
yeah. and then later, this morning actually, i was thinking maybe it's the bluntness that's attractive, the outright brave seeminglyunwavering hope. the allowance for others to generalize about your naivete. when really you have hope. of being that open to it, and to the criticism attached to that today.
and the picture of it, of being titled, official, badged and open in your desire your declaration to be clean, to aspire to be clean, to be pure of heart or try, try, saying out loud without euphemism (yes) "i want to be closer to this...holy, i wish i was holy, i want to be holy." mm. to not hide in under the rug of more common, greater occupations which really just want the same thing but translated to skyscrapers and chemical breakthroughs and genetic engineering and political science and philosophical essays. (sometimes .to me. i see these all as the same thing. in that sense...)
/
catching.