SIGMA (from Greek <to hiss)
A fragrant cup of dark light. It would be good to drink
this darkness.
You seem stretched on your litheness. Your ivory pinkness, freckled,
you are a dream. You seem stretched on your shores. You are an island.
You are the fragrant and dark sun. You are red, you are a red sun.
You tell me you are hypnotized by dead fish swirling in the dirty ponds
of your eyes. You say my poem is a mirror. I laugh. You clear the
blood off my fore arm. Wincing, I scrawl your name with the drying
blood. Let it dry, I say.
You tell me you are going to visit me tonight. I remind you we've never
met. No matter, you say. You live in here, you tell me, punching your
heart like a warrior. At night you dance with stars. We are still
talking as I follow the marionette strings with my eyes. They reach
from your shoulders knees head hands and feet all the way up to H3aven;
which has begun to show out the corner of the partially ripped sky, a
huge, boyish eyebrow peeking down behind a thick, puffy, heaped up
cumulus cloud. The marionette strings are bunched up up there, in
silver.
I am reaching for the fragrant cup of darkness, you are telling me. The
dank hairs of your sex tickle my nostrils. The gashed red sun is
setting between your legs. The overpowering scent of the sea fills my
poetry. My tongue is rolling along around a sea of tongues. There is
not any unknown word or name. The bubble of the ocean between your
thighs wraps a blubbery sheet of warm wetness to my face. Thought is
drunk with slit, the marionette strings are bunched up at your waist. I
feel boyish tugs at each buck of your hips, I imagine the angel of
mischief above, pulling the marionette strings, you are moaning.
There is not an unheard of name. You tell me your friends' names, one
by one. At the thought of each name I associate its meaning. You ask
this of me, smiling. I say, Clairvoyance. I say, The Daemon Peace. I
say, Father Farther. You laugh. This is great fun. Your hips are
still naked. They are goosefleshed. You are rouge. The island begins
to rain. I can never decide if this is not also you are weeping. I
begin to weep. Our mouths come together. There is a thunder. No
matter, you say, you tell me to sleep. Our hips shake, like rain soaked
kittens, hippies dancing, two Chevys drag racing, Daytona Beach closet
queens, kindergarten blocks, icy funerals, television commercials,
central intelligence or mormon birth years; I close my eyes. I keep
closing my eyes. The island is windy. Your belly is being washed by
this cool rain. But since it has been hot all day, you are steam now.
I breathe you.
It is settled. You bind my arm. You write magical sigils onto my body.
You tell me I am the remaining shards of a certain piece of Divine
Pottery thought to have been lost forever, two days after the world was
created. You trace the history of Lemuria and Atlantis in the patterns
of my blood vessels. You place a cupped hand above my heart beat,
listening for poems. You tell me I should be fully healed within three
months.
Three months, I say. I exclaim loudly I have never known you. I
explain to you that I am near to d3ath. I beg you to strew fragrant,
red roses along my room, in my hair, among my souls. I tell you with
utter certainty that I have passionately loved you since I was ever
born. You laugh. Well before that, you tell me. You say I am a
shipsman. You tell me I have dictionaries in my hair. You open my
belly up for a second and show me the vision four heads pointing in each
cardinal direction. These represent the elements, you tell me. You say
I am a woman in disguise. Eros, you say, walks upon the heads of all
those buried beneath him. Not shrinking back from his feet to touch the
Earth, you say. But walking open hearted.
You seal my belly back up again with a kiss. You begin to suck and gnaw
at my belly button. Your hair is caressing my chest and groin. The
soft skin of your face brushes against my smooth belly like a
paintbrush, leaving trails of sunset along the island. Electric
lightning marionette strings dangling over the ocean's violent, purple
undulating.
Why don't you play some music, you suggest. There is not much time
left, your lips have not moved. You fill the coffin with your beauty.
My eyes have become rivers. They are rivers of gold twine some innocent
children mistake for hair, but they are tears. The palm of my hand has
your face in it. You are a circle. I play my flute. A Host of angelic
beings arrive. A Host of infernal ones, too. The grass begins to grow
around your coffin. The Millenial signet grows mysteriously from this
grass, differently colored. Twenty four Daughters of Albion dance to
this piping, which has grown in scale to deafen the storm. The rain is
entirely invisible, and does not consist of water, it carries no
substance. My tears take root in the soil. The two, thick, gold twine
weaves stretch from my eyes to the ground in front of your coffin.
There the tree grows. Its roots twine with the roots of your coffin, in
a deadly struggle for survival.
STANLEY GEMMELL