She may or may not be a Human Being. I put my hands in the water and feel a jellyfish. I take out my hands and the translucence slips away with the water. The translucence slips away through my fingers and soon the shimmering, effortless creature is still and opaque, like hardened skin. The lights that flash in the dark water stop flashing. The translucence slips away. I know I can remember feeling it. I put my hands in the water and felt it there. What more can I say? There is nothing to write today.
The problem is obvious. I no longer feel or think anything. My body used to burn with thought; my brain trembled with emotions. There were months I spent in the dusty rooms I rented in an alley full of temples, in the heart of a city whose streets twisted together into birds’ nests of hidden cages and nocturnal tin-roofed empty under-reaches where I’d go wandering in the dark, my mind on fire, to empty public toilets immaculately antiquated under the dripping, corrugated eves—submarines up from the depths of the past—submarines of mirrors and wide-brimmed sinks. I know just as well she was a part of that but try as I might I can’t find her. I put my hands in the water and bring out a jellyfish and in the moment before it turns as opaque as a foot I see the buxom Chinese barmaid tipping her tits over a game of Connect Four with an American sailor, she is flashing, and yellow-gloved proprietresses of off-alley barbershops scrubbing my scalp there in the mirror photo of my own face transposed, in the dark of our rented rooms, dusty, neon shining in smog, she is flashing, her legs around a corner, her kung fu uniform, the smell and presence of her sour and brittle and innocent. I put my hands into the water and I can feel the jellyfish pulsing past my fingers but I pull up a handful of soggy typewritten pages. I look for her in my dried up brains and all I can find are the proofs of old novels or a poem written stone drunk in the night long ago in the house we shared with French doors boarded over to make a wall and a dance student in the basement endlessly climaxing like the song of a bird sung by a whale. It was a poem about shaggy, unkempt roses in the snow.
No use making excuses. The past is a type of tyranny. It is the tyranny of Heaven. Vegetarian angels lounge around, bored to the brink of violence, in stylish, but casual, clothes. They watch, silently, disgusted, their unshaven mouths shaped into a self-satisfied smirk of judgment and nonchalance, fashionably meager, thin as swords, stylishly unkempt, unable to finish a shiny green apple, watching, as bored as angels, while you sift through the scraps of your life, pulling up moments fossilized by repetition into stiff reproductions of their long-departed animated selves. Looking among the trash heaps of our own oblivion, these broken phalanges are privatized, seized without ado by one of the lesser angels, and stored in one of the rented campsites of Heaven, far removed from the vibrant, animating context of the common, the all-pouring, simultaneous, every-dimensional continuum that is the flesh of God. You pick up a stony finger, like the spine of a twelve-foot perch, and looking through it into the distance, like looking backwards through a telescope—there you are! In your garden, watching your father bury the kitten you killed, or lying on the tubes of an old outdoor chaise lounge listening to the radio while your father barbeques—surely a Saturday before there were Saturdays when the sun ran backwards in the walnut tree. But in those piles you can’t find anything, any scrap, of Her. You put your hands inside yourself and feel the jellyfish pulsing near your fingers, but can’t find Her inside of you because she’s gone. Out of the nexus, the memory of presence fades. How many gallons of Moskovskaya did it finally take to remove the stains?
You know, you know like a Doge, that you watched M.A.S.H. together in that hard pink bed! But you can’t remember Her! You can see the weave of the seams, the texture of paint on the wall like eggshell, the gaudy dressing room mirror, unfinished bathroom with its cracked plastic tub, you can see M.A.S.H. on the TV—accidental Leonardo under the tent flaps in fog—but not Her.
How can that be possible? You used to be a volcano. You used to break lamps and dance naked on the shards. Crawl through rusted pipes as tight as steel birth canals. Swim down the rope anchored to the muddy crocodile bottom and climb down the tree sucked blind by the muddy current, tree sunk to the top of its boughs in mud and piranha. You used to feel something when you looked up at the stars in the jungle, counting the crosses or kites—the schoolboy diamonds of diamonds which are stars which are kites. There she is for a flicker, her voice, her presence—there! Her frown—sad again, always sad, sad and furious as a child in that Australian condominium, drunk into fury, the night we all ganged up on her and when she passed out I went out to listen to speeches on how I must never, never. Kangaroo corpses littered the highways, emus running in the mountain meadows like teenaged farmers with their arms torn off, sun like yolk on the red, red soil—no rosy Kayenta—and the boughs of eucalyptus—eucalyptus turning in the light—leaves turning coarse to rough, rough to coarse in the wind-born pointillism of twisting leaves, that picnic in Mungo when we saw the roos chewing up close, giddy as kiddies, then climbing the dunes. I can feel her innocence shining in the sanctuary outside Melbourne. I can feel her innocence open like a koala’s eye, like a grimace relaxing into a smile, I can find no smile—I can construct one—but I can find no legitimate smile, but I can feel her innocence respond when we watched the koala, up close, as close to the koala peacefully sleeping in its crook of eucalypt as we ever were to innocence. She is a koala. She is a child. And I was rapt for her, I was a martyr in the world of men, I tore my mind out and filled the cavities with the transparencies of sorrow shining, dirty windows in an empty kitchen, and oh, prestigious, how many gallons of gin—because, I’ll say it to these angels who’ve never known the umbilical prelapsus, we were children together, playing, mindless, in the innocent shaggy-rosed snowy garden of our minds.
Where is that? Where is that mind of mine? Gone baby gone. Gone to San Diego. And I am still out there in the desert beside the Tesla coil and I am waiting for her to come back to me. I am shaking. I am the blue, shaking flames. I am the blue flames shaking upward into the darkness.
Andrew Haley’s poems, short stories and translations have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Zone, Quarterly West, The Smoking Poet, Stop Smiling, Otis Nebula and Sugar House Review.
Editor's note: This is Part 6 of a six-part series. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.
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