Prose Poem Prolix The Second

PROSE POEM PROLIX THE SECOND

By JCSTREET © 2004 all rights reserved

I'm standing in the
arrivals lobby of Dublin airport; waiting
for a woman I haven't seen
for 23 years, I have
jelly legs and dizzy spells, I have
flights of fancy and fugues, I
don't know what I'm doing here, I
don't know who called this meeting, I
can't even remember what I'm doing in this country.

I know she's coming, it would be
too late to walk away, I'm
so scared I don't know if I'll ever erect
again.

I remember the love, I
don't remember the body.

II

She might be wrinkled and sere, she might be
old and decrepit, she
might be wearing sackcloth.

But she was never like that, she
could be wearing the flared skirt, have the
great legs, be wearing the garter belt and stockings I
bought her in '77, she
could be wearing the push-up bra or be a little bit sloppy in a sweatshirt;
nursing-nipple-nubbed.

We could jungle-fuck in the airport carpark or I could cry.

But it's too late for maunderings. Rubber meets road. Terror meets wonder and . . . here she comes.

I see the big glasses and I know it's her and my body aches. I burn and twitch; wondering now how she sees me.

She's uncertain and casting around; scoping the airport; confused a little. She's wearing a flared skirt and her great legs come back to me in a flush of memory. She's wearing a light white blouse and a blue jacket and dragging a small suitcase and pushing a cart with duty free yellow bags and miscellenia; walking closer; flustered and not connecting.

A small thrush is beating its feather wings in my heart, I am
shaking and scared, my
mouth is dry. I
want to engage her but I'm not ready, I'm
taken aback, branca'd stotted, skeined, fucked up, unsure, rattled.

I have so much to say that I'm devoid of speech.

She sees me and I start to cry. All my hubris explodes in a vapor of hopelessness. She is too beautiful to grasp and I cannot bear it.

I had hoped to loose-hiproll in her direction--swing the hips and look evil, magic and beautiful. But I can't pull it off. I'm frozen.

Autopilot kicks in and I
stumble toward her
holding out my arms, her
her face is
moving in slow motion from perplexity to wonder, I
see her lips part and the
beginnings of a smile.

I see her bright teeth. I see her lips. I am walking and
I am so tensed up I can't walk.

And suddenly she is with me as she always was. Suddenly she is in my arms and the tears sprout like spring radishes from my eyes. I feel my bowels loosening; things happening in my belly; things I had lost forever.

She comes into my arms and I
feel her straw hair against my ear, I
feel the sweet tissue of her light clothing and the nepenthe of her bodysweat, I
feel the warmth of her body and the skein
of her breath on my neck, I feel her need
and her fear.

We murmur together in the lingua franca of unknown separations; the impossibility of this never-ever-again meeting. Our throats conjure sounds of uncertainty, terror and hope.

And she is here--three-dimensional; in the flesh . . . here in Dublin.

It all stops and we cling desperately. We cling.

I start to stutter and she completes my sentence.

"I'd love one."

So we head for the bar . . . me
dragging enough of her goods to qualify
as the strong male goods bearer.

It's not far to the bar in Dublin airport but I
don't think they meant it as a cliché.

We stash all her stuff close enough to the bar that
Romanian tinkers won't do running raids
on her booze and purse and I
order a double vodka for her and a single for me 'cause I'm driving.

She stutters
I stutter
She laughs
I laugh, I'm
terrified and
shifting in my seat I have
no magic, no beauty, no charisma left. I'm a husk.

We drink. I order another and we drink again. No driving today so we load up yet again and stagger to the door to find the courtesy to the airport hotel. I haven't checked out.

I go to the desk and book another night and then we stagger down the endless corridors to the back room. No Irish bellboy emerges from the gloom to offer baggage succour. it's no Donleavy novel this new-fangled hostelry.

The sterterous breathing
issuing from our tired bodies
obviates difficult
conversational gambits.

You can score a lover in the lobby of the Dublin Airport hotel and have nothing left but carping enmity by the time you stagger to a room.

But God spares us that ignominy and she giggles as I fumble with the electronic card in the doorlock; she giggles.

We stagger in while the door attempts to force us back into the hall and having wrestled it down grope for her duty free. It is the torch that immigrants see on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. It is our salve and succor. It is our escape from the terror of our meeting.

My body is quivering and my skin is shot silk, she is
floating in a waiting for me to say something please and
I have nothing to say. We are
drinking from the bottle and I know we are both
going to get shitfaced and
grapple and fight and scream and fall to pieces in a frenzy of hate . . . but . . . perhaps not quite
yet.

I can't stand being on the bed with her. I need the separation of a table but
when I open the curtains and look out at the not yet full morning I see

a bird on a tree and
a green lawn and
farther back the dark line of the woods and I
think that this is a fine sight to see and
beckon her over and she comes.

Across the table is focus. It brings us down to the place where we would be. It gives us space and distance and intimacy and goodness. I reach for her and she takes my hand and holds it to her cheek. I am crying again and she indulges me.

We are coming down,
down and down and
down again and I am
flayed with wonder, I
never knew it could be this way, I
never knew that we could be again, I
just never knew and she is smiling in her sad shy way and
looking at me and is that a tear that herself is sprouting when I thought it was only me.

But it's speeding up now. We've chugalugged a quarter bottle of Absolut Citron and we are prepared to lie to each other. Suddenly we have both hands on the table and are grasping and squeezing. It's a Reagan/Gorbachov international friendship jamboree.

It takes me aback when she leans far over and slips her tongue into my mouth, Before I can grasp this snakeslip pinkness with my teeth, my lips, my tongue, she withdraws and licks the bottom of my chin. I open and close my mouth impotently as she teases my nostril and then flicks her pink childpenis across my eyebrows. I see the first rise of her girlbreasts and feel the upwelling of light grapefruit as her perfume begins to rise. She is standing upright and
leaning over the table to engulf me.

I am overpowered.

She sits down and giggles. But she gets up to try again and this time I rise with her and reach for the straw that she once was and pull her against my body, knocking over the bottle, discomfiting the table and fusing my lips to hers as if to suck sweet poison from a snakekiss.

I pull her over the table; her legs give out and we concertina fall backward into the radiator and them akimbo onto the carpet.

Our tongues are soft animals
groping for cavespace
cavespace in the dark;
folkdancing slithers in the maw of the beast, I am
erect and her hips are parted and my beard is gouging red weals on her cheeks . . . and then we break apart and sit up and laugh and try to get up and fall back stupidly and laugh again and we don't care.

When we stagger to our feet and sit down at the table and rescue the bottle and measure how much we've lost she says:

"YOU have to sleep on the wet spot and then does that curious titter I remember from the white nights of Ottawa and the red sunsets of the Big Rideau.

I remember the sound of that
laugh in my ear as the sun
fell into forest hell across the river and up into the trees of the Gatineau Hills.

I remember. I want to cry again so we drink.

And now I have found my voice; my song;
my forestkeen; my ache and I speak and lilt
and talk and court and love and
reach out with the husky rhythm of my suit and she looks
and listens and reaches for me yet again and I
stroke the sere skin of her thin wrists.

But now the embrace that follows
takes us staggering to the bed as we
unbutton, unzip, unfurl,
rip, wrench, tear. loosen and divest all those skins
which sing between us until, almost unclad,
we roll, wrestle and wrest from each other more
heartfelt kisses and pets and touches and teases, this
Queen-sized bed allows but one and a half rolls back and forth and
when we err to two we fall fumbling into carpet country—still
kissing, fumbling, pulling ache-cries from each others’ mouths and not caring.

We could be dead and there would be no sign.

We could be dreaming and screaming while neighbours were summoning police officers to our door. We have no reality in this hopeless meeting.

But now the physical impinges more plangently on the dream as our newfound nakedness asserts itself in the fusing of her ins to my outs, her curves to my spaces, her sweet cunt to my mouth. The hunger of an age resolves to the muskiness of a seven-hour flight as I kiss lick, bite, worry and tease with no let; while my one probing finger sprouts sunshine where it has never shone.

She writhes, cries
moans, grasps
thrusts against my body, wrestles in to me,
grasps me rampant to her belly and slips me in;
where I pause teasing --not
thrusting; pause teasing and only slightly engaged while our lips fall into a
new and lighter fusing . . . while our
lips now dance cunningly
with no pressure . . . while
wonder replaces ardor even as we
dance more closely into
makebabytime . . . while thrust is not thrust but only delicate insinuation . . .
only hesitant testing of will . . . only
teasetouching tenderness.

This light tease-kissing, with its heldback screaming joy . . . with its fissile possibility, churns muscle and blood to mush and makes us weep. Tears are the lubricant of our cheekfuck yearning. Our 23-year pine makes us tingle with impossibility. We hang back terrified of endings. We cannot finish our beginnings. Lovemaking is a wonderfuck of what ifs.

So we get up and drink again but now we are naked and constantly exploring with light touchings. I move my fingers within a molecule distance of her goosebumps and transfer my love capacitively until I know she feels the zing-splat of high voltage and shivers with that lovely frisson shoulder-swing.

I remember that shoulder-swing--how it galvanized our pizza nights at Queen Street, after the music had died and the neons had sputtered and the church spire was a navigator's mark into the hills where slaves brooded before light.

And always the goosebumps . . . the
childwhite skin the
babybreasts with
the stiff pink nub of the ready nipple, I
ached for milk and suckled until she
cried out with the let-down shudder rippling her belly;
screamed and cried and
ached while I fell upon her in a frenzied desire to be so
jellied that we would skinslip
into each others' skeletons and
become chimerae.

And then our heads would pound with the whisky and we would shake in the fear of apprehended deaths.

Another time with Lonnie the childservant from the Ministry of Fear, whom we
cosseted in the big bed. Lonnie with her imploded nipples and lispy speech, who sat her buttocks on my lips while my lady straddled me and embraced sweet Lonnie in a newfound friendship. Those were the days my friend. We thought they would never end. We pre-existed before the song took root.

Every song comes out of the wombs of young girls and their dreams
of bogey men and trains going west, sweet
Judith whom I met on the CN train coming
screaming out of High Level Alberta in the snowy night and
she was new to the big smoke and I had a cabin and she sat in second class where the three-day ride would make her too musky to bear, but
bear it I did, galvanized
by a love I had never known; a passion that was murderous in its thrust.

We coupled like rutting beasts, hurting and killing each other. We sat in my cabin watching the falling snow float past station lights across the prairsweep. She sat on me till I was aching and sore and she raised the bottle to her lips and leaned back while I tried to decouple from the ache.

Sweet Judith. Twenty-three years had only burned skinlove into the bone.
Twenty-three years had only crystallized my yearning need to implode; to lose
ego in a swiftplunge into flesh. Surely I would be a Buddhist if only I melted
into her body and disappeared.

There was no caring after
sweet Judith, no
will to live, no
need to survive, all

was irrelevant if she would only enfold
and love me as a child in her womb, and
all my fucking was only an attempt to slither back up
the birth canal to my first station;
back to the place from whence I had sprung
full-formed
with a soul of soft crystal.

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