Nocturnette No.8 : First Light.
By Jan Lakowski.
I am an archivist.
The same seamstress that wrought that soughing winding sheet, bound that wench's thrusting crotch to the keels of stars by her voluminous pubic hair, in braids of light years. Coughing lice all the way.
Somehow, through apocalyptic means, she became preserved in a great obelisk of amber.
I am an archivist.
I catalogue the world according to my freewheeling obsessions, evolving in flux and always frantic, bloody, aflame and turning.
Some lock themselves away becoming lost, some burn, others sprawl becoming titans, causing car wrecks and sinking relationships with the soft weight of endless night like a great affectionate cat.
Her entire cardiovascular system is smoked dark like a caribou loin. Her voice is cracked, and great depth shows in the fracturing. She displays poise in the mud floes that irrigate the oakwood. Elegance in argumentative virtuosity, and defusing intensity with dinner. Well dressed without labels and tracksuits, with subtlety of colour and sensibility regarding the wiles of the weather and the symptoms of particular topography.
These are some of the qualities of her personalities. The rest is chaos.
I am an archivist.
Frost bitten, facing a pyroclastic flow, a lava chase, the metamorphosis of the holocaust. Treblinka took her great grand daughter from me. The span between a Whitechapel waif barefoot and wild in excrement and carrion, and the trout-faced queen in cold mediocrity, who never wants for anything but wanting.
I am an archivist, fully in the medium of sleep.
I follow you down through reverie into dream, in a great glass diving bell, brown as a wine bottle. Deep, deep into the soft black void, of petals, woodsmoke and chocolate tea. I smell her skin's nectar, kiss her hair and feel her forehead cool and smooth against mine.
Snowfall smothers the green wood, drowns the grey sleeping sea, cocoons Hosia in her lean-to and snuffs out the sun.
You forget me now, like a dream upon waking. We will only be together again, for a moment as we die. Every morning I wake with you, as you were before the end. Sweet, smiling, unable to conceal your joy. Yet now you tell me, that it is ok
to let go. Your eyes wide and true, head nodding, sure. Assuring me. " It is ok to let me go, sweetie. Let me go. You must go too."
I feel warm tears ascend from my throat, spilling over the eyelash's precipice. To wet the phone's screen, the wavering hand, the vulnerable wrist, white as porcelain.
I feel you missing in me. My gut weighs that fear. A pining for your soulful nearness. The soul of you I loved. Every fault, every fever. All true in you to me.
The old you is always there, a wonderful but venomous ghost. Not yours now, just mine alone. All of you in me, spent.
Why is it thus?
The answer. A woman of a forest still omnipresent, and impenetrable. Caucasus crowns of firs that ease the weighty cosmos. Adolescence made her gawky, now she awaits the additional puberties of vampirism and lycanthropy to finesse her allure. Demonology too if the stars chime. The nobility of her blood is wild in every lurching cell. Feel the sexual nausea of a vital claret that pinballs through her arterial taiga and skeins of snow skin. This is the nurturing plasma tinctured with the musk of resin caught in the woody deeps, Baikal fumaroles, interstellar pine canopies, a coal blackened, carpenter Christ birthed by a wayward shadow in the warmest copse in June. No Jesus.
We finally meet long after the melodramas have been finely sutured and the cuttings swept. A match is struck, a candle blooms, a cigarette is lit. You can tell just by the quality of her smile, because that glimpse of teeth and unfolded lip throws your gut to the right or left, and more than anything you want to see that smile again.
"Zoologists know nothing of mythology. Were you aware?" There was no acknowledgement of my question. "Classification of species is always informed by the notions of the past. You research an animal by bearing witness to its behaviours in its habitat, and then you research the greasy shadow it has bled through the scientific paper trail. Even then you might miss a ghost or two" Both brown eyes are righted to meet mine, benighted further by a frown. "You speak like a drunk, did you know that?" I adjust my fork and envision that smile. Her hair is as rich a brown as the warm winter copse. A refuge in the snow sugared pines. When the drifts are mountainous, and the falling flakes obscure almost every patch of night sky, that is the place you would nuzzle. A cosy nuzzle of her muzzle. A kiss on the nape of the neck, just a little wet, and then inhale a deep breath of her scent. It's gooseberries, sandalwood, pine resin and her sex in the slightly sour nature of her sweat.
"Yes"
Snowfall chokes the blue trickling vein of stream. At the Devils elbow it is first a hushing tourniquet, and then the arm is neatly broken, and once frozen, the bone is set, gleaming white in a ragged, yellowed poultice. Snowfall cloaks each of your eyelashes, m'lady, melts in your hair turning wood brown into coal black. The wind moans and the moon rises like a blank eye.
The night is sure, black, and indifferent. The universe is heartbroken. It bleeds through all dimensions to suffer the sad medium of you.