Lynda Hull

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal. We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat. They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me, from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual. Below, the river and the high rock where boys each year jump from bravado or desperation. The day flares, turns into itself. And innocently, sideways, the way we always fall into grace or knowledge, we watched the police drag the river for a suicide, the third this year. The terrible hook, the boy’s frail whiteness. His face was blank and new as your face in the morning before the day has worked its pattern of lines and tensions. A hook like an iron question and this coming out of the waters, a flawed pearl— a memory that wasn’t ours to claim. Perhaps, in a bedroom by lamplight, a woman waits for this boy. She may riffle drawers gathering photographs, string, keys to abandoned rooms. Even now she may be leaving, closing the door for some silence. I need to move next to you. Water sluiced from the boy’s hair. I need to watch you light your cigarette, the flickering of your face in matchlight, as if underwater, drifting away. I take your cigarette and drag from it, touch your hand. Remember that winter of your long fever, the winter we understood how fragile any being together was. The wall sweated behind the headboard and you said you felt the rim where dreams crouch and every room of the past. It must begin in luxury— do you think—a break and fall into the glamour attending each kind of surrender. Water must flood the mind, as in certain diseases, the walls between the cells of memory dissolve, blur into a single stream of voices and faces. I don’t know any more about this river or if it can be cleaned of its tender and broken histories— a tide of voices. And this is how the dead rise to us, transformed: wet and singing, the tide of voices pearling in our hands.

1. The Letter Everywhere the windows give up nothing but frost’s intricate veined foliage. Just engines shrilling pocked and frozen streets wailing toward some new disaster. No bright angels’ ladders going to split heaven this Chicago instant where the pier’s an iced fantastic: spiked, the glacial floes seize it greedy like a careless treasure— marquise diamonds, these round clear globes, the psychic’s crystal world spinning in her corner shop when I passed, a globe boundaried with turning silent winds and demons. Out here the pavement’s a slick graffitied strip:There’s more to life than violence.

For Wally Roberts, 1951-1994 Palaces of drift and crystal, the clouds loosen their burden, unworldly flakes so thick the border zones of sea and shore, the boundless zones of air fuse to float their worlds until the spirits congregate, fleet histories yearning into shape. Close my eyes and I’m a vessel. Make it some lucent amphora, Venetian blue, lip circled in faded gold. Can you see the whorls of breath, imperfections, the navel where it was blown from the maker’s pipe, can you see it drawn up from the bay where flakes hiss the instant they become the bay? Part the curtain. The foghorn’s steady, soothing moan—warning, safety, the reeling home. Shipwreck and rescue. Stories within stories— there’s this one of the cottage nestled into dune snowed into pure wave, the bay beyond and its lavish rustle, skirts lifting and falling fringed in foam. But I’m in another season—my friends’ house adrift, Wally’s last spring-into-summer, his bed a raft, cats and dogs clustered and we’re watching television floods, the Mississippi drowning whole cities unfamiliar. How could any form be a vessel adequate to such becoming, the stories unspooled through the skein of months as the virus erased more and more until Wally’s nimbused as these storm clouds, the sudden glowing ladders they let fall? But that’s not the moment I’m conjuring—it’s when my voyager afloat so many months brought back every flood story I carried. Drifting worlds, and Wai Min takes a shape I tell Wally as steady watermarks across the cold bare floor— Chinatown, South Pacific flashing its crimson, neoned waves tranced across Wai Min’s midnight eyes behind black shades, and that voice unraveling past each knocking winter pain. It’s another world I’m telling, Cognac and squalor. The foghorn’s haunting drone blends with that halting monotone, scarlet watermarks, the Sinkiang’s floodtides murky brown, the village become water, swept away. Three days floating on a door, his sister, the grandmother weaving stories endless beneath the waxed umbrella canopy she’s fashioned, stories to soothe the children wrapped in the curtain of her hair, to calm the ghost souls’ blurred lanterns. How rats swam to their raft, soaked cats, spirits she said, ghosts held tranced by the storied murmurous river. I have no spell, simply the foghorn’s song when voices unbodied, drift over water past the low dune this cottage nestles in becoming shape in motion stilled. No boundaries on this point, foghorn singing its come-home incantation over the ruthless currents. And isn’t it so we’re merely vessels given in grace, in mystery, just a little while, our fleet streaked moments? As this day is given, singular, chilly bolts of snow chenilled across the sky, the sea. How to cipher where one life begins and becomes another? Part the curtain and here’s my voyager afloat, gentle sleeper, sweet fish, dancer over water and he’s talking, laughing in that great four-poster bed he could not leave for months, a raft to buoy his furious radiant soul, if I may hazard to say that? Yes, there was laughter, the stories, the shining dogs— gold and black—his company. Voyager afloat so many months, banks of sunflowers he loved spitting their seeds. Tick. Black numerals on the sill. A world can be built anywhere & he spun, letting go. . . . The last time I held him, the last time we spoke, just a whisper—hoarse—that marries now this many-voiced mansion of storm and from him I’ve learned to slip my body, to be the storm governed by the law of bounty given then taken away. Shush and glide. This tide’s running high, its silken muscular tearing ruled by cycles, relentless, the drawn lavish damasks—teal, aquamarine, silvered steel, desire’s tidal forces, such urgent fullness, the elaborate collapse, and withdrawal beyond the drawn curtain that shows the secret desert of bare ruched sand. I’ve learned this, I’ve learned to be the horn calling home the journeyer, saying farewell. And here’s the foghorn’s simple two-note wail, mechanical stark aria that ripples out to shelter all of us— our mortal burden of dreams— adrift in the sea’s restless shouldering.

Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty tree. Take a phrase, then fracture it, the pods’ gaudy nectarine shades ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest and tail feathers. A musical idea. Macaws scarlet and violet, tangerine as a song the hue of sunset where my street becomes water and down shore this phantom city skyline’s mere hazy silhouette. The alto’s liquid geometry weaves a way of thinking, a way of breaking synchronistic through time so the girl on the comer has the bones of my face, the old photos, beneath the Kansas City hat, black fedora lifting hair off my neck cooling the sweat of a night-long tidal pull from bar to bar the night we went to find Bird’s grave. Eric’s chartreuse perfume. That poured-on dress I lived days and nights inside, made love and slept in, a mesh and slur of zipper down the back. Women smoked the boulevards with gardenias after-hours, asphalt shower- slick, ozone charging air with sixteenth notes, that endless convertible ride to find the grave whose sleep and melody wept neglect enough to torch us for a while through snare-sweep of broom on pavement, the rumpled musk of lover’s sheets, charred cornices topping crosstown gutted buildings. Torches us still—cat screech, matte blue steel of pistol stroked across the victim’s cheek where fleet shoes jazz this dark and peeling block, that one. Vine Street, Olive. We had the music, but not the pyrotechnics— rhinestone straps lashing my shoes, heels sinking through earth and Eric in casual drag, mocha cheekbones rouged, that flawless plummy mouth. A style for moving, heel tap and lighter flick, lion moan of buses pulling away through the static brilliant fizz of taffeta on nyloned thighs. Light mist, etherous, rinsed our faces and what happens when you touch a finger to the cold stone that jazz and death played down to? Phrases. Take it all and break forever— a man with gleaming sax, an open sill in summertime, and the fire-escape’s iron zigzag tumbles crazy notes to a girl cooling her knees, wearing one of those dresses no one wears anymore, darts and spaghetti straps, glitzy fabrics foaming an iron bedstead. The horn’s alarm, then fluid brass chromatics. Extravagant ailanthus, the courtyard’s poverty tree is spike and wing, slate-blue mourning dove, sudden cardinal flame. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.

Sometimes after hours of wine I can almost see the night gliding in low off the harbor down the long avenues of shop windows past mannequins, perfect in their gestures. I leave some water steaming on the gas ring and sometimes I can slip from my body, almost find the single word to prevent evenings that absolve nothing, a winter lived alone and cold. Rooms where you somehow marry the losses of strangers that tremble on the walls like the hands of the dancer next door, luminous with Methedrine, she taps walls for hours murmuring about the silver she swears lines the building, the hallways where each night drunks stammer their usual rosary until they come to rest beneath the tarnished numbers, the bulbs that star each ceiling. I must tell you I am afraid to sit here losing myself to the hour’s slow erasure until I know myself only by this cold weight, this hand on my lap, palm up. I want to still the dancer’s hands in mine, to talk about forgiveness and what we leave behind—faces and cities, the small emergencies of nights. I say nothing, but leaning on the sill, I watch her leave at that moment when the first taxis start rolling to the lights of Chinatown, powered by sad and human desire. I watch her fade down the street until she’s a smudge, violent in the circle of my breath. A figure so small I could cup her in my hands.

In those days I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights. In the throats of hibiscus and oleander I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells enameled hard as the sky before the rain. All that summer, my second, from city to city my young father drove the black coupe through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever parceled between luggage and sample goods. Afternoons, showers drummed the roof, my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew something of love was cruel, was distant. Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled to a purple fist. A necklace of shells coiled her throat, moving a little as she murmured of alligators that float the rivers able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years. And always the trance of blacktop shimmering through swamps with names like incantations— Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding white above swamp reeds that sang with insects until I was lost, until I was part of the singing, their thousand wings gauze on my body, tattooing my skin. Father rocked me later by the water, the motel balcony, singing calypso with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics a net over the sea, its lesson of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed over his shoes, over the rail where the citronella burned merging our shadows—Father’s face floating over mine in the black changing sound of night, the enormous Florida night, metallic with cicadas, musical and dangerous as the human heart.

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows pasted with colored squares, past the man who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past crates of doves and roosters veiled until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets with sulphur as people exchange gold and silver foil, money to appease ghosts who linger, needy even in death. I am almost invisible. Hands could pass through me effortlessly. This is how it is to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows untranslatable as the shop signs, the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle in the stairwell, the corridor where the doors are blue months ajar. Hands gesture in the smoke, the partial moon of a face. For hours the soft numeric click of mah-jongg tiles drifts down the hallway where languid Mai trails her musk of sex and narcotics. There is no grief in this, only the old year consuming itself, the door knob blazing in my hand beneath the lightbulb’s electric jewel. Between voices and fireworks wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush— no language I want to learn. I can touch the sill worn by hands I’ll never know in this room with its low table where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign for Jade Palace sheds green corollas on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here in the chastening glow, darkening my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest of my life widening away from me, waiting for the man I married to pass beneath the sign of the building, to climb the five flights and say his Chinese name for me. He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where the new year is liquor, the black bottle the whole district is waiting for, like some benevolent arrest—the moment when men and women turn to each other and dissolve each bad bet, every sly mischance, the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway. He brings fish. He brings lotus root. He brings me ghost money.

It snakes behind me, this invisible chain gang— the aliases, your many faces peopling that vast hotel, the past. What did we learn? Every twenty minutes the elevated train, the world shuddering beyond the pane. It was never warm enough in winter. The walls peeled, the color of corsages ruined in the air. Sweeping the floor, my black wig on the chair. I never meant to leave you in that hotel where the voices of patrons long gone seemed to echo in the halls, a scent of spoiled orchids. But this was never an elegant hotel. The iron fretwork of the El held each room in a deep corrosive bloom. This was the bankrupt’s last chance, the place the gambler waits to learn his black mare’s leg snapped as she hurtled towards the finish line. * * * How did we live? Your face over my shoulder was the shade of mahogany in the speckled mirror bolted to the wall. It was never warm. You arrived through a forest of needles, the white mist of morphine, names for sleep that never came. My black wig unfurled across the battered chair. Your arms circled me when I stood by the window. Downstairs the clerk who read our palms broke the seal on another deck of cards. She said you’re my fate, my sweet annihilating angel, every naked hotel room I’ve ever checked out of. There’s nothing left of that, but even now when night pulls up like a limousine, sea-blue, and I’m climbing the stairs, keys in hand, I’ll reach the landing and you’re there—the one lesson I never get right. Trains hurtled by, extinguished somewhere past the bend of midnight. The shuddering world. Your arms around my waist. I never meant to leave. * * * Of all that, there's nothing left but a grid of shadows the El tracks throw over the street, the empty lot. Gone, the blistered sills, voices that rilled across each wall. Gone, the naked bulb swinging from the ceiling, that chicanery of light that made your face a brief eclipse over mine. How did we live? The mare broke down. I was your fate, that yellow train, the plot of sleet, through dust crusted on the pane. It wasn't warm enough. What did we learn? All I have left of you is this burnt place on my arm. So, I won't forget you even when I'm nothing but small change in the desk clerk's palm, nothing but the pawn ticket crumpled in your pocket, the one you'll never redeem. Whatever I meant to say loses itself in the bend of winter towards extinction, this passion of shadows falling like black orchids through the air. I never meant to leave you there by the pane, that terminal hotel, the world shuddering with trains.

A perfect veronica, invisible, scallops air before the bull, the bartender’s fluttering hands. Tipped with silken fruit tinseled gold, a dusty banderilla hangs above racked bottles, burnt-orange. Your lacquered fingers streak the cocktail napkin and the globe of cognac’s fragrant on the zinc bar. Fields of chamomile. Close your eyes and then the night turns to coal seamed with diamonds. Outside, a girl murmurs her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men. Irita, the barman calls when she wanders in to wash at the single coldwater tap. Just a fly-blown café on your functionary’s street of flats, bedrooms shuttered around their whispering, the shops that gleam by day with scaled cellophane piglets, mounded bins of fruit and olives. Irita rewinds her hair at the bar, a gilt rosette nestling its waves, tattered bullfight posters on the wall behind her and you think of Rita Hayworth tossing roses in Blood and Sand, the frayed banderilla. Such a lovely thing to torture an animal with, the corrida’s exacting choreography of life and death. Sometimes it’s soothing to evaporate in this smoke-patinaed air, abandoning your imposter’s life of embassy files breathing the military names and numbers, Torrejón’s precise cold barracks. Your face wavers, oddly calm in the mirror as the girl talks dancing and flamenco clubs to the barman, absinthe glass shining derangement in his hand. It’s the place in the night where you carve an uneasy confederacy from vapor and exhaustion, a trio—the alien, the clownish poseur, the girl with nothing to sell but herself and straitened, cataleptic dreams. She stretches, plays idly the slot machines spinning roses, babies and lemons, the brilliant suit of lights. The caramel glow of the barlamps haloes her hair, bitten lips. Another sip and the slots’ click is rosary beads wafting prayers up to a heaven of slink and spangle, quick bargains struck in alcoves, that old palm of chapped fingers slipping coins to the gas meter, of spreading stain across the counterpane. Around Bar Xanadu narrow streets fill with the violet steam of after-midnight, the pigeons’ soft venereal cooing that speak of want like this, that deep original loneliness. There are heartless places in every city you’ve lived. Cognac spreads its window of warmth and the drifting years return bordered with the crimes of night, with cramped rooms you’ve climbed to, dead as the money in your pockets. A “dimestore Mata Hari,” the bureau chief called you while he snipped a fresh cigar. On parched plains outside the city soldier boys drill before the fighter planes, glamorous with starlight, still floating half-asleep in some Iowa of vinyl booths and Formica, miles of hissing corn. But it’s closing hour and beneath your fingers the napkin snows its raddled lace across the bar and you must rise with them, rise to dust with the barman his green bottle, help him to don the sparkling jacket. Rise to strap the magic shoes to Irita’s feet and then you must walk with her these streets you’ll never leave, gritty with wind from Andalusia riffling your skirt in the scent of blood oranges and sweat.