--LOVE RAISES ITS FIST TIME AND TIME AGAIN
Life is an Arboretum
Fronds
are breaking through the sheets of ice on your face as your cellphone buzzes
for the twelfth time during dinner.
You are a busy
lady. Important. An attorney to boot.
Now
you are also desired. Someone wants to
fuck you very badly.
His name is Roland. He doesn’t seem your type. He’s short and stiff, a rigid robot monkey,
as if his bones will not sway. I’ve seen
him walking. It would be comical if he
were someone I didn’t know.
You punch the keyboard on your phone
while your cheeks turn cotton candy pink.
Your eyes whirl like two drill bits doing hard work as your tongue
actually sweeps over your lower lip, making it glisten.
Happy times for you.
My best friend is a dullard but a
good listener. He’s fond of
platitudes. “It takes two to tango,” he
told me when I first shared what was happening.
Today he said, “It is what it is.”
He said, “Whatever doesn’t kill you
makes you stronger.”
He said, “There’s plenty of fish in
the sea.”
He said, “I bet your dick is
bigger.”
He said, “At least you’re not
homeless.”
He said, “Things would be better if
you were more positive.”
This last one is what I focus on as
gravy steams the underside of my chin, the dirt smell of shitake mushrooms
slaking up my nostrils. “I really like
the way you’ve started doing your hair,” I say.
“It suits you.”
Your eyes come up from the phone
skittish, with you giggling. “What was
that?”
“Your clients must be comedians,” I
say, not feeling positive anymore.
Your mouth twists while your nose turns
into a hatchet made of flesh.
You
sigh and tell me, “Well, it’s just nice to be happy once in a while.”
You sling darts like this all the
time now because I am a blow-up clown made of thin plastic. Air hisses out of my ears and pores. I am leaking so much that my friend greeted
me with, “Hey, Schecky, you get any skinnier, somebody’s going to make shoelaces
out of you.”
Here comes another text.
Roland
is feeling very randy.
He
wants to thrust those hard bones over you, into you, through you, and maybe
that’s something you want because I see how your hair has become a garden replete
with milk-white tulips, your earlobes fuchsia beets that have been gently
plucked from the earth and rinsed with care, your dimpled chin a gleaming, yellow
lemon rind.
Other (so-called) advice my friend
gave me:
“This is just a bump in the road.”
“Everything
happens for a reason.”
“There is someone somewhere worse
off than you.”
“Love means never having to say
you’re sorry.”
With my fork, I break the moat I’ve
made of my mash potatoes. I watch the
sludgy gray gravy pool over the rim of my plate. The gravy become a stampeding river that
washes across the dining room table, slides down the sides, onto the floor,
some splattering on my pants.
When you say, “You’re making a
mess,” I don’t know whether to chuckle or scream.
In bed, near midnight, I hear you
slink off the mattress. The bathroom
light shoots a stripe across the bottom of the door. It’s more texting, or maybe sexting, or
perhaps a combination of both.
I hear my friend’s voice again:
“You don’t need people like that in
your life.”
“Life is short.”
“Life is a bitch.”
“Life is easy, comedy’s hard.”
I watch the moon wink at me as
clouds slog through a bruised-blue sky.
I rise, dress, and leave without closing the front door.
I
drive not knowing where I’m going. I
roll down the car windows. The air
smells like an arboretum, verdant and lush: a place where things grow or die,
where they’re uprooted or left alone, a place with fertile soil that can be
tilled and renewed.
I
turn up the radio, singing as loud as I can, even though I don’t know any of the
words.
