I got up. I walked round the room, saw all the books there on all the shelves. I came through to the front room and I picked up the photo on the mantelpiece, the one of us in the garden, you pretending to fan me with the rhubarb leaf, huge and green, holding it by its stalk, bright red. The stalk is withered dry, my love. The photo meant you were dead.
But the photo kind of meant I was dead too.
God. If I had a chance to fetch you from the underworld, to go down and persuade them and fetch you home, I’d never look back.
But maybe you wouldn’t want to come back. Maybe, like the woman in the poem, you were already root. Maybe that was why not even my imagination could bring you back anymore.
Imagine that hand on the end of that arm. Imagine it talking. If it was your hand, it’d be being high-handed, it’d probably be talking of Michelangelo, saying something really intelligent like do you remember the Michelangelo drawing I took you to see when it was on show, the one where the man is waking up from a dream? The beautiful man sitting on a box of masks, leaning on the large ball, the shape of which is a bit like buttocks or a peach — remember how he’s wakened by the boy with wings hovering upside down above him and holding the slim trumpet so close to his forehead that you can almost feel the hairs prickle in the space in between? It’s as if the man is being reborn, remember? But is he waking from a dream or is he waking into a dream?
Ah, I’d let a hand like yours take me anywhere, even down a path strewn with bones like the floor of the cave I’d seen in the film by Werner Herzog, the Chauvet cave in France where they discovered all those tens-of-thousands-of-years-old animal pictures on the walls, the beautiful four heads of the horses, the creatures with long sweeps of horn. Above the bones the earliest ever art. Even on a path strewn with bones like that I’d be okay in your good hand.
It’d be as if we were walking through the inside of a skull, the rock in the cave all folded formations like glittering linen. Then we’d cross a river, I suppose, in a boat with a three-headed dog. I could use the hand and the arm as an oar. Then we’d get to a room littered with all the things you’ve taken from our house, all manner of things which we had in our life, all the old clothes and shoes, the old toothbrushes, all the squeezed-out old halves of orange, they’ll all be there, like a junk shop of our lives, a bit like eBay, or the internet.
Then we’d pass through that, me on your arm, and into a dark room, three dark walls, one lit bright wall — the light would be coming from behind the wall, and I’d go to the wall and I’d cut through the wall with, I don’t know, there’s bound to be something back in the junk room I could use, an old penknife, something with an edge. I’d get through it anyhow. It’s only a screen. There, beyond it, in a pure white space, you’d be standing like a figure in a holy picture. You wouldn’t be broken any longer, or torn, or rotten, you’d be whole, beautiful, light would be coming off your head like off the heads of Renaissance saints in paintings, great lines of gold, you’d be haloed in a kind of golden light like in the song by Beyoncé where she sings how she can see the person’s halo and that person is her saving grace.
That’s how cheap I am. That’s how far I am from Michelangelo’s Dream. That’s what the mouth in the hand on the end of my too real arm would be doing, singing some trivial junk like Doris Day’s Let the Little Girl Limbo, or something by Beyoncé. Everywhere I’m looking now. I’m surrounded by your embrace. Standing in the light of your halo.
Is that what liminal is? the light that came off you when I first saw you, that day when you walked past me? Because you were lit, you were lit by something, and it wasn’t the usual kind of light, and you were so beautiful I almost had to leave that room, I swear your beauty was changing the surface of my skin.
Halo halo halo, what’s goin’ on ’ere then? I woke up and it was all a dream. No. More like: I never went to sleep and it was all still real.
So much for my Harpo Marx coat. Imagine Harpo Marx as the guide to the real twentieth-century underworld. Like Harpo Marx crossing a Brueghel painting. And so much for my Artful Dodger pockets. If I remembered rightly, what was about to happen to him any minute in the story was that he’d mean less than a snuffbox and they’d send him off to sea. Transported, that’s the word for it.
I picked up my copy of Oliver Twist to flick forward and see — and the book fell apart in my hands. So I spent some time trying to stick its pages and spine back into readable form with cellotape. It wasn’t till I was about to get into bed and was plugging my phone in to recharge that I saw I’d missed a message.
It was the counselor. Hello, she said, please accept my apologies for calling you, again this is rather unprecedented, but I just wanted to let you know as soon as I could that your language, the language we spoke about, is a real one, and it does seem to be Greek. Epomony is Greek for patience, as in having patience. Guide a ruckus seems to mean little donkey. Spoo yattacky means small sparrow. Trav a brose is a phrase that means move on, go on, proceed, go to the front of things. There’s one word my husband says is untranslatable, what it really means is a ball of rags or cloths tied together to make a football, but by someone too poor or hopeless to be able to buy a real ball, so in human terms it means an outsider, a fool, a person on the edge of things, someone a bit too simple who won’t fit in, or an old-fashioned word like mooncalf. Clot so scoofy. And just one more thing. He says they’re all songs, your words, and that they’re all associated with one particular Greek actress.
Then she said a name I couldn’t make out. Then she said goodbye, and the answerphone voice told me to press a number on my phone if I wanted to save the call for seven days.
I listened to the message again. A donkey? a sparrow? a mooncalf?
I got in on my side and put my head back onto the pillow. I stretched an arm and a leg over to your side of the bed. Then I moved my whole self to the middle of the mattress, actually the best place in the bed for a good night’s sleep.
I closed my eyes.
Patience.
On offer and on reflection
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
There’s always a first day in late winter — usually near the end of January though it depends how hard the winter’s been — when the bare trunks of the trees shine green and the buds on the ends of the branches glow slightly brighter than the rest of the tree. It’s the day the sapwood starts up working again, the xylem sap filling the trees’ arteries, well, what trees have instead of arteries, with the fluids and minerals stored all winter in the roots.