The Elgar: Second Movement (Flight of the Hummingbird)

Part 1 is here


She had noted his backwards flight.

And softens her forward thrust.

Her mind disengages as the bow arm flirts and hovers like the wing of a hummingbird. The membranes of her muscle pulse across this movement’s petals and thorns, while not far below, darkness jaws. She relishes this suppleness from herself, and others. Athleticism rouses her from a digital bolero of play, and repeat.

Her heart is a pump.

Her heart. Is a pump.

Her heart—

She ran from the cottage until she reached the water’s edge, his baton a white flame in her fist. The afternoon heat marinated the cut grass, while the lake drank deep from the sun’s nectar. Spring is the season of miracles, someone had once told her. But all she believed in was the mud sucking at her toes, the cool breeze impaling her breast, before she thrashed away.

Positioning the baton between her teeth, she turned to confront him.

“Did you call her, Catherine?”

His color was high, his voice a broken string.

“Did you tell my wife about us?”

She spat out his stick in her hand.

“I did.”

He seized her by the shoulders, and shook. For a brief, ecstatic moment, she coveted his fury. Aiming the baton at his heart, she started to lunge.

But flesh is so fond of surrendering, even during a blood charge.

Her legs collapsed, and he sank into her like a man falling on his sword. She watched the baton sail from her hand, and find its measure of rest. She rested, too.

And the dandelions sloughed their seeds as two bodies swam up one another in a current of silence.

And the scent of lilac chloroformed the air.

And a bird dropped to earth, in search of sticks for a nest.

But she was deaf to earth and sense and time.

When her eyes opened, there were tears on her cheeks, though her own eyes were dry. The war drum in her chest reminded her, with its imperfect beat, that only death survives such sweet, terrible silence.

And so the woman who did not believe in miracles pushed her lover away. Cruel enough for him to remember his wife again. So far that his tears might swamp a lake.

She stood to track a bird with a baton in its beak.

Straining for it to conduct her in birdsong.

Her heart is a pump.

Her heart is a pump.

And so, she thinks, as the hummingbird finally falls dead, this fluid staining my cheeks must be blood-red.


To be continued...


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

The Elgar: First Movement (The Man Doomed to Love)

A conductor tenses his baton. A cellist draws her bow.

In an opera box, the man doomed to love checks his breath.

The initial thrum only shocks the spine, but there is a next—and a next—and a next—all plucking at and plundering the white nerves within. He seizes, his knees splay, the clean line of him shredding underneath her assault. Leads sweat, and spark. Vision blurs. An aging body slathers itself with the heat of Pavlovian memory.

The Elgar. Their concerto. Of some twenty, muted years.

He twists the leather glove to restrain his hands from conducting her, from molding her, from beseeching her for that final encore. The fierce abstinence bulges and quivers his neck like the slim reed between her fingers. Those instruments of torment, slashing across his back and chest. How she had bruised and bludgeoned him.

In her pretty dress.

With her pretty, pretty song.

Scars split their seams, and the liquid adagio of a sluggish heart courses into his autumnal skin. Blood surging faster than notes. Sweet delusions, the speed of light.

Their first concert.

Applause like firecrackers.

Her hot kiss on his ear.

The dressing room after.

A crashing of cymbals.

The long reverberation.

An orchestra throbs its gorgeous agony.

He is on point. Vibrato.

Her writhing stokes a golden frenzy about her shoulders as she rocks and inflames the wood between her thighs. A house of longing straddles her strings. She opens her worldly eyes. And smiles at her maestro.

The man doomed to love bites hard on the leather.

And tastes her skin.

Crying out, he lurches to his feet. The cancer of his need wrests him back, back. Back past his wife with her chorus of tears, back past his friends with their requiem faces, back past the velvet shroud . . . back . . . back . . .

Back to somewhere before.

Some time.

When he was his instrument.

And she was his song.


Find the Second Movement here.


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

Of Mermaids and Exorcisms

Vesper tagged me with the highly contagious 6 Random Things meme that's infecting the blogosphere. Hopefully, it won't be fatal.

The rules, as copied from her blog, are:

Link to the person that tagged you - ie me.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write six random things about yourself in a blog post.
Tag six people.
Let each person know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their post.
Let the tagger know when your entry is posted.

So here I go:

1. I once made 28 free throws in a row as a freshman in high school. Since this is unquestionably the single, greatest achievement of my life, it receives top billing. Suck it, Shaq.

2. I was that girl who never spoke up in class. I was also that girl who had a thing for the guys who did speak up in class. Yes, I loved me some nerds.

3. I've lived in 2 Athens. Ohio and Georgia. And despite the fact that one's in the Deep South and one's in Appalachia, they're remarkably similar. No "Love Shack" in Ohio, though. Figures.

4. I experienced my first kiss in a movie theater, during Ariel's angsty rendition of "Part of Your World" in The Little Mermaid. Sure, I was 13, but even then, it seemed a little uncool. Still bought the soundtrack, though. And made liberal use of the rewind button.

5. I can't watch horror films. The pressure is just too intense. The Exorcist actually makes me religious.

6. The most amazing thing I've ever tasted was the graham cracker I ate after giving birth to our daughter. I never wanted its yummy, crumby goodness to end. Yes, yes--the kid was kinda sweet, too.

And there is always the hope that someday she, too, will make 28 free throws in a row...or find first love through the cinematic manipulations of the Walt Disney corporation and/or Pixar.

A mom can dream, can't she?

I know what the rules say about tagging people. But honestly, most of the blogs I visit have already been tagged, or were tagged concurrently with me. So if you're looking for something to post, feel free to dive in! The water's warm...and rife with random mermaids and their secret longings.

Thanks, Vesper! This was fun. :)

The Strand

If I were to swing
from Luna’s trapeze,
and trace Earth’s ribs
with the quills of
this mane, let my
knees finally give
atop Dolphin’s Smile,
the lip where the
moon suckles foam

I think they call it The Strand.



[Thank you to Christine Eldin for
asking me to write a poem including
the word "Strand." I really enjoyed the
spirit of her Before Sunrise challenge.
This one's for you, Chris!]

Milkshake

Before Sunrise is one of my favorite films. Jesse and Celine meet on a Eurail train, and in the glow of a mutual attraction, disembark at Vienna to spend a day (and night) together, before resuming their regularly scheduled lives in America and France. That one day is a beautiful gift, an unlikely improv, especially for being so sweetly ephemeral.

In the scene above, a poet approaches the couple as they walk the length of the Danube, offering to write them a poem incorporating a word of their choice, in exchange for money. Celine chooses "milkshake." He scratches off something in two minutes.

I love the spontaneity that threads the movie, and the related challenge laid down in this clip. But I'm slow. Which is why I stuck with haiku. It still took me five minutes, though.

Vanilla pulse points
Sweating out summer sunbeams
Milkshake to his brain

What do you think: does time determine a relationship's success? Can such a transient pairing, or poem, attain the kind of "quality" that we respect in longer couplings, or works?

I'm not sure . . . but I know I love this movie.

[Video courtesy of pici1]

The Fugue

Last night,
her believing
in his breath
across the barrens
of white tendon,
black marrow

But it was only the
wild, wild winds.

And this morning
dawning so still,
so sore,
like piano keys
after a
Rachmaninoff storm


[Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, by Eugene Delacroix]

Anticipation

When these
leggy chromosomes
(called our bodies)
fuse upon a
fated spindle
(called our lips),
something nameless
inside of me
will unravelto bind the
something nameless
inside of you


[Photo of chromosomal meiosis
courtesy of Zac Cande.]

D.C. al fine

I know there are coils

still to be sprung from the

Rhapsody of Time, but

this nostalgic bow of

mine can only hook,

and slide


[Family photo, Summer 2004]

Dirty Cello Thoughts, Part 1

If I permit these
knees to drift, like
so, will you pull your
eager string against
my tender bow?



[Yes, I'm learning the cello.
No, I sound nothing like Mischa Maisky.
But please, please listen to this Prelude to
Bach's Cello Suite No. 1, especially from
about 1:55 until the end.
It gets me every time.
Video courtesy of Bacholoji.]

Surfacing

I apologize for being such a flake about the blog during the last month and a half. And, more importantly, for being so entirely absent from your blogs, too. I have had my reasons, but none is good enough to explain the total neglect and silence. I'm sorry!

Anyway, I've missed being a part of this community . . . and I look forward to plunging back in.

Tomorrow. :)