Tennessee Williams

We have not long to love. Light does not stay. The tender things are those we fold away. Coarse fabrics are the ones for common wear. In silence I have watched you comb your hair. Intimate the silence, dim and warm. I could but did not, reach to touch your arm. I could, but do not, break that which is still. (Almost the faintest whisper would be shrill.) So moments pass as though they wished to stay. We have not long to love. A night. A day....

I Eastward the city with scarcely even a murmur turns in the soft dusk, the lights of it blur, the delicate spires are unequal as though the emollient dusk had begun to dissolve them... And the soft air-breathers, their soft bosoms rising and falling as ferns under water responding to some impalpably soft pressure, turn with the city, too. The petals of tenderness in them, their tentative ways of feeling, not quite reaching out but ever so gently half reaching out and withdrawing, withdrawing to where their feminine star is withdrawing, the planet that turns with them, faithfully always and softly... II And if there is something which is not soft in the city, such as a cry too hard for the soft mouth to hold, God puts a soft stop to it. Bending invisibly down, He breathes a narcosis over the panicky face upturned to entreat Him: a word as soft as morphine is the word that God uses, placing His soft hand over the mouth of the cryer before it has time to gather the force of a cry. It is almost as if no cry had ever been thought of... And, yes, over all, soft canopy over soft canopy, web over soft, soft web, gauze hung over gauze, the mysteries of the tall heaven, the tall and very soft heaven, are softest of all!

After you've been to bed together for the first time, without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance, the other party very often says to you, Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you, what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you lying together in completely relaxed positions like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed. You tell them your story, or as much of your story as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, until the oh is just an audible breath, and then of course there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror. And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story, they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along, and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming no more than an audible sigh, as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left, draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion and stops breathing forever. Then? Well, one of you falls asleep and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

I Androgyne, mon amour, brochette de coeur was plat du jour, (heart lifted on a metal skewer, encore saignante et palpitante) where I dined au solitaire, table intime, one rose vase, lighted dimly, wildly gay, as, punctually, across the bay mist advanced its pompe funèbre, its coolly silvered drift of gray, nightly requiem performed for mourners who have slipped away... Well, that's it, the evening scene, mon amour, Androgyne. Noontime youths, thighs and groins tight-jean-displayed, loiter onto Union Square, junkies flower-scattered there, lost in dream, torso-bare, young as you, old as I, voicing soundlessly a cry, oh, yes, among them revolution bites its tongue beneath its fiery waiting stare, indifferent to siren's wail, ravishment endured in jail. Bicentennial salute? Youth made flesh of crouching brute. (Dichotomy can I deny of pity in a lustful eye?) II Androgyne, mon amour, shadows of you name a price exorbitant for short lease. What would you suggest I do, wryly smile and turn away, fox-teeth gnawing chest-bones through? Even less would that be true than, carnally, I was to you many, many lives ago, requiems of fallen snow. And, frankly, well, they'd laugh at me, thick of belly, thin of shank, spectacle of long neglect, tragedian of public mirth. (Chekhov's Mashas all wore black for a reason I suspect: Pertinence? None at all— yet something made me think of that.) "Life!" the gob exclaimed to Crane, "Oh, life's a geyser!" Oui, d'accord— from the rectum of the earth. Bitter, that. Never mind. Time's only challenger is time. III Androgyne, mon amour, cold withdrawal is no cure for addiction grown so deep. Now, finally, at cock's crow, released in custody of sleep, dark annealment, time-worn stones far descending, no light there, no sound there, entering depths of thinning breath, farther down more ancient stones, halting not, drawn on until Ever treacherous, ever fair, at a table small and square, not first light but last light shows (meaning of the single rose where I dined au solitaire sous l'ombre d'une jeunesse perdue?) A ghostly little customs-clerk ("Vos documents, Mesdames, Messieurs?") whose somehow tender mockery contrives to make admittance here at this mineral frontier a definition of the pure... Androgyne, mon amour. San Francisco, 1976