Mandorla

Abstract

How quickly a gilded edge shades into charcoal, how city streets and tree-lined borders, tensile wires across a bridge, can darken without warning, as though a wrist had merely guided the flat side of a coloring stick across watermarked linen to change day into night. And the retinal shutters adjust, the irises open wider like plants coming out of water. A woman descends to the trains in subterranean corridors, smoothing her bell- shaped skirt the color of plums, of Bordeaux, of things that have lain a while in the clarifying dark. People walking in the park glance up at a sound— only a plane crossing the night sky: not in itself remarkable, only part of the age we inhabit. Even now a nameless future rears its rump at the end of the boulevard, displaying indifference. Arcs of copper neon open like fans; in shop windows lettered signs advertise White Nights, Golden Girls. Our guide points out this neighborhood, describing a wide circle with his arm—a continuum of taverns in Dostoyevsky's time, any of them the very one into which Raskolnikov might have slipped to wheedle a drink. I don't need to close my eyes to see the emerald from an absinthe glass [End Page 15] drain into the hollow of a throat, feel the places behind sockets of bones where liquid comes to rest as heat that rends and loosens. If in the end what swallows all is the very darkness the mouth fears, what it spurns at the end of the cup—the trembling hand begging for one, one drink more—what would we do with perpetual light? Unsettling sun at midnight, shimmer of candy-striped, mosaiced cathedrals that until recently warehoused grain and timber and brick. I want to know more than— to see—how a body recognizes what it loves even before it's poured into form. The way I dropped down on my haunches, combing through green beside a path with both hands one summer in a different city by water— because a tendril of scent unspooled itself out of the tightening dusk. Volatile white, it was the odor of jasmine I rooted for among the vivid campanula in the garden, a halo of scent that flickered as if to match the ripples drawn by goldfish on a silken pond. To witness beyond ruin, beyond the wound— the reason for our constant return to places of elusive thought, furtive form. Two bodies sliding apart in a room above the river after a kiss. A sliver of the beautiful, light as an almond wafer on the tongue. Sometimes one glance unlocks the portals, revealing that nimbus where heaven and earth are joined as one. There is a story of a child running from broken towers in Manhattan, transfixed by [End Page 16] the sight of common birds, their burning— as if a flock of phoenixes beat the air with wings of chalcedony, tourmaline, jasper, onyx; with the gold of icons' haloes, of consuming fire.