Work Text:
in the light that throws itself on everything—
lazy, indolent thing,
careless in the way only time can be,
burning and taut around her like a too-tight lead—
nathalie rests her head and spreads her hand,
greeting ephemeral memories.
though she knows it isn’t something she can hold,
isn’t hers to keep, in soul or sleep—
once, she had.
and that alone turns her palm without
shame towards the sun.
the light that throws itself on everything,
stretching twice, at dusk and again at dawn,
agrees to stay, but only for a while.
it can’t promise much:
a burnished-gold warmth,
or, other days,
horrid-cold in its embrace.
but, as now as it was then—
in marriage beds and through a party’s canopy of heads,
all too drunk to notice two shadows becoming one—
it feels like enough,
just enough.
the light that throws itself on everything
favors the quiet plane of her forehead,
the bounce in her nose,
the swell of her cheeks and
sometimes, in a way that makes her blood heat and simmer,
where her legs slide into inner thigh.
it’s heedless of the company she keeps,
pressing insistently on window panes
through deep yellow rays,
inviting them, too, to lend their fingers.
but there’s few people,
maybe only two,
whose hands agree to this communion,
who let grief linger as long as
she likes.
sitting with it, she’s read,
countless times in countless books in countless different ways,
is the most important part.
(it’s not without note from her
that they never mention what to do
amongst all the crying and counting
if you can’t get back up,
if the light brimming
feels less like swimming and more like
drowning.)
it will always find her,
that light that—
now and forever and then once again just before death.
but today, she takes her alms at her desk
admiring how the lifeline shadow on her palm
will always illuminate, will always run
hot under this giltwork gaze
this can’t be right, it’s completely split, émilie said
through a giggle bright with drink and
a little more than usual of nathalie’s spit.
meanwhile, mine has this ring—
it was more than cheeky, the way nathalie kissed
the silver one and not the one that worried émilie.
always jealous, always tempting, always she
intended to wrap her teeth around it,
slip it off like a garter and
kiss where the valley lay between.
a stolen christening of a stolen bride.
I guess you’ll live longer than me.
she laughed so hard she cried and nathalie did, too,
with only the latter feeling true.
and she wishes this was the memory alone,
but émilie, émilie, émilie—
when didn’t she kiss that fault line split?
get a kick out of
married women live shorter lives,
said between smirking lips,
or is it the other way around?
when didn’t she compare?
past and present,
their sinful covenant in
tibet and this,
no more fun than the regular
high strung sigh of luxury wives and their lies.
when didn’t she suppress her moan against
purposefully, that palm,
always during the unfaithful,
more
ruthless rendezvous.
I guess you’ll live longer than me.
another giggle,
I guess you’ll live longer than me.
another slow and somnolent moan,
I guess you’ll live longer than me.
another raspy, reedy, heaving coughing fit
and replacing the orgasmic blush
blooming red across her cheeks,
it was only blood that shone
in that light that throws itself over everything.
threats and epithets
like,
our dear secretary
she has the same eyes, the same line
dotted and broken through her palm
as that little bird through its center,
but it isn’t her who’s sent for
in the end.
like,
between the two of us,
whose life has been better spent?
she spat, an animal limping the perimeter
of her house, her tomb, her
own mind, the last escape.
and do you think,
my dear nathalie,
that I envy your fate?
color flushing her usual pallor,
between the two of us, in the end,
who will really recover?
softer sometimes, not
quite as harsh,
like,
as always,
will I have to come for you?
as then as now, tempting.
teasing fingers below émilie
as she teased nathalie’s hair above.
it’s not so dissimilar now,
the heat of the light now a halo crown.
and, if she’s honest,
she does want émilie to come
for her, only her, just her—
but where there’s a wing of white on nathalie’s head,
it’s gabriel whose arm rusts black and sheds,
opposite colored keys on émilie’s piano.
her hands playing refrains to choose
who she’ll come for in the end
who is reverent and who is merely revenant:
vatic vows of life and death or
the ones said in affairs
best kept in the company of the woman
with whom she slept?
crept away now, nathalie’s dreamt
the light away.
she’s been good with just sitting,
she really has been—
it’s just been a day .
so, instead of the moment, she holds the cold
creep of cerulean grief,
slick and unwanted in her fist,
no place to set it down for relief.
it would be easy,
now as it was then,
to follow émilie down the hall.
count dust motes like memories and
the melodies in mournful recall.
she’ll visit her painting,
make herself tea,
grow two stories tall and sun-kiss
the venerable head of her little prince, ever unaware
that the smell of london fog at five
is the same that haunted them all
when émilie was still alive.
it’s harder still for nathalie to wait
as émilie suffuses the house in gold.
slinks around rueful corners
shadows growing and silting as she glides,
a cross over nathalie’s bed, the only time
émilie has ever touched it—
the thought is enough to spark a fire
if émilie catches her on a weaker day,
illuminates the absolute fool she makes of nathalie,
spread and lonely and wanting
the light that throws itself on everything.