Archive for the ‘Alex Dally MacFarlane’ Category
For Two Years
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
It is said that when Captain Widal recovered from his mysterious disease, he would not talk to anyone about what had happened. But he was a kinder man. … He never married, though he was seen once or twice with a beautiful young woman whose name was never known. … Neither did he ever wear short sleeves in public.
– Widal: A History
I put spices on your tongue for two years, night after night. I folded my fingers into yours and I pulled the sheets over us.
And you did not blink.
You did not notice — even when I pulled up your shirt, just a little, to the elbows.
Captain, Captain, I am writing on your body.
You did not notice, night after night.
We met in a café in the narrowest street, but you do not remember me. You sat at the table and ordered hot water with a lemon squeezed into it, and I poured it for you with hands that you took into yours, saying, “My mother’s looked better when we exhumed her. Girl, do you eat?”
“Sometimes,” I replied.
“Take this,” you said, “and eat more often.”
I brought flowers to your window, day after day. I sat with my harp in my lap and I played for you.
When you collapsed in front of a small group of townsfolk, none carried you away. None remained in the street to check your pulse, but me.
You fell asleep, my mother later said.
An enchantment, my father said, and good riddance.
I brushed your hair. I polished your buttons. I gave my parents all the money I made with your coin and I bought what I needed to care for you.
I took your coin to the races and I brought back handfuls of gold.
And you did not blink for two years.
Bottled and Un-bottled
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
Five bottles on a shelf, they sang songs to me on a cold winter’s night: songs of lips against snow, of roots, of tusks and of gold and of all that piled in the room, spoils of my father’s travels. They always found a way into his pockets, those oddments.
And I, their un-bottled sister, was their ear.
And I, their ten-fingered sister, stood on tiptoes in the kitchen to take dried peach slices from the wooden boxes, to take cardamom and cloves from the dispenser. I stood in front of the shelves and dropped my fruits and spices into the bottles.
They murmured thanks, every one.
Eyes and mouths and four finned limbs grew from them in haphazard ways, puzzle ways, and I watched them as if they would move just-so in their bottles and make a neat pattern.
“Have you seen fish in the water?” one whispered — or was it two? I couldn’t follow all their mouths.
I tilted my head to the right, looking at the dried blowfish behind one of the bottles.
They swam around it in the toilet bowl, pressing their lips to it — like fingers, I thought, to learn how it felt — and they swam down when I flushed, down through the pipes that curled like my hair, down to the underground rivers.
I’d stolen my father’s oddments before. If he noticed, it was only to see an empty space on his shelf for another travel-token, another spade-shaped coin or intricately carved statue of a mermaid.
A week after I emptied the five bottles, he filled them with shells and sand from a black beach in the Aegean.
And I, growing older, saw the five un-bottled boys on warm nights when I walked alone by the river.