Woman
Marc Laughton
A run, slip of fabric against the inner thigh. And she drew the breath in, like saltwater stinging the nostrils; the gait shifted, a broken-winged raven she became, conscious of her step in odd-metered rhythms. From the corner of her mouth, the oil of a wilting iris; coating the fleshy, plump arc of her lower lip. In this weather she knew the interior dimensions of her heart, an icy beat muffled by something—maybe, she thought a wave or maybe the soft sounds of retreating animals into the tide, entreating their death in every solemn motion. And everything about her was a love song; her hands tracing minute patterns, and she closed her eyes to believe that as her fingers graced the hips someone desired her. On the exhalation rode a scream, and her vision blurred— the blind couple that walk every Saturday up and back across again in perfect tempo smeared with the weight of tears, momentarily erased in a blink, smothered by a moan; and she came.
Perhaps, she thought, I am a poem. Or, I am a spectral vision passing in daylight between places I once was in. In her silence she walked towards the West End, where the chalked bones of her mother lay, buried in the rich soil—my mother plays a piano with her friend Ruth Weinberg at night when we are asleep, and speaks in Yiddish to passerby’s above the ground who turn their necks in hope of attaching some body to the voice. She laughed thinking of this, but could not prevent her left hands from its spasms. Frequent, that is, frequently she shook as if things moved through her. Her father drank alone in the last years of his life, blind and eating rye over a table in a dark apartment and attempting to call out for his wife; when all he could hear is a response of sirens below, his lungs sunk and his eyes were wells of sorrow. He shook violently in these moments. And so, when she began to feel mute, somehow a passive observer to the crime of her own life she shook to feel, to feel what once was.
Odd, how as she distorted all of her beautiful frame—leaving her legs uncrossed in skirts, feeling unabashedly erotic in such moments—to ride in taxis going aimlessly in the direction of the setting sun. A pastime, she might say, of hope; if one could only beat the sun and Icarus in their mad dash flight into the darkness, then one would have been accomplished. Abraham was a sun she thought not of god but of the heavens, a sun shining brightly, a radial pattern of light reflecting of the sands of Israel. She wished above all things to be called by someone a Sarah, a desert princess who speaks in the tongue of Y’israel, a thing above all other things, radiant. It was said, at least by her, that in the cool of night she pressed her fingers to her lips and brushed them gently, finding in their simplicity a beauty unparalleled; her mouth the source of rebirth, her abdomen the wish for love, her eyes burning oil fields, her breasts the origin of mankind, and her words always and forever coded in prayer.
Love for her was an opportunity for failure, watching a bird with its small heart die in your cupped hands. Dreaming, I was only dreaming…Darling I hope that my dream never haunted you sang on, Billie Holiday on repeat, a Sufi dance in the words spinning, racing thoughts in her mind as she whispered Sarah.
