Neuresthenic

 

So many loves are born, grow ill, and die

in the  momentary

shifting of one's shoulders;  for instance, there's

that smile with which she reassures me

this church's priest is  a woman and a lesbian, so

I don't have to cover my head upon entering

and stitch my lips closed with fishing line.

She says this, from the pew in front of me

and then leaves her partner, another woman, a lesbian, 

and comes back and sits with me (with reason,

as if it's a logical convenience, she wanted

to talk to the person who was sitting too far

on her left for her voice to reach, etc. . . but

partner crosses her frown  and  knows). So

awkward her elbows and her hands and her crossed

knees in this complex choreography

of our joints and limbs mirroring each other

and trying to avoid coupling, though the more

we restrain, the more her hand touches her knee

as if she were touching me, the more her hair

is tossing a splash of bright on her shoulders, even at night

in a church! Next time, we'll meet, it's at someone

else's 50th wedding anniversary, a couple her partner

will toast, O two grey heads nodding together for half

a century an inspiration to us all, a paean

to guilt disguised as an inducement

to idealism and monogamy, but

she, well. . . she's been ill for a week.  I'll think

I should have said something, so she

wouldn't so drastically have taken

to bed,  as if  I should have

caught her before she had to fall

to the fever of feeling. Her face will look scalded

as a bird who has had all of its plumage

soured in hot water. When we meet

in the kitchen, her partner will be elated,

bubbling while refilling the bowls,

but she, she will say something I will not

be able to hear, because the misery

she'll be staring into me is so dismal

and damp. Later by the fire pit, she'll call

me and insist  it's too early, I cannot leave,

playing that game that she  plays

commanding me, both of us surprised that I obey,

so I'll stay with her, a few moments cold

as she tries to warm herself by a too small and ordinary fire

contained in its iron grate, wondering

why I'm the invisible casualty

and now visiting the recovery room  of her awkward silence;

as if her smile that shattered several rooms

had been nothing but a virus she hopes

the fever has burnt out .

Participation Mystique

 

Desperate, I ask where I can find her, and A says nowhere

then gestapo camp,

 

(does this mean all the while she's cultivating

her shining façade,  she's serving out  her internal sentence

for imprisoning and exterminating entire villages of all those

who once loved?)

 

I remember those months

when she drove her selves trembling into the corners, crooning

my shorn hair could be her pillow, how she was lit by the lampshade

of my skin when she looked into the mirror, with its rim of horn and bone.

 

She repeats, nowhere, look for me nowhere.

                                                                        Was that what

she meant when she answered me with 'a silence most speaking?''

Not love's throng of feeling, but the edge of the schizophrenia

that broke her sister into bits,  the fat cow she called her,

when she laughed harshly and said she'd given her enough.

 

If all politics are personal, do we enact within ourselves

the genocides we abhor? Who were all these voices in her,

and always crying out to me, the girl

who wanted to dance with me, swirling in my dress, the woman

who wanted to break open the most secret cry with a kiss

and why was it ever so bad that all those voices moaned with longing,

and how could she, how could she, silence them all?

 

She must have held them down, trampled their softness into the floorboards,

letting them leak out of her lips, whimpering

only when she had drowned her official voice in a vat of whiskey

and could give them a holiday, a day out,

 

naturally, a day 'out', but it's hard to think of this splintering

effect as the effects of repressed H-O-M-O-S-E-X-U-A-L-I-T-Y,

though she'd draw it out like that, even on a page. Somewhere

between the queen deposed in a palace revolution, the urchins

in Nepal,  the rags and scraps of her being in her South African

house, I lost track of the stories. It was insane,  it is

 

insane, what she was telling me, and insane

that I listened. Now she's saying it's Gestapo camp,

I don't know if she tells them what to do, of if they tell her,

or if anyone even talks to any other. This morning

 

I turn away

to open the window blinds tenderly (I will never open

the eyes of the blind)

 

and she looks at me  as if she wants to go back to the old days

of fastening a dog collar around

my neck, you idiot, she says, it's not 

the waves of darkness in the me,  it's not waves

of darkness, it's sperm and blood and excrement

 

that I'm drowning in, all the things she held

within herself. She insists, what is happening in her

is what has happened in the world, she insists

                                                            didn't she

put all the animals in herself into cages, didn't she

administer the needle that put the world to sleep. . .

 

And maybe  it's true the world is happening within her

as her madness is happening in me, so I  read

the most complicated philosophies to try

and understand. Maybe it's capitalism, I say,

the schizoid personality extending its commercial

enterprises in every direction even into the human

soul?

 

I don't have one, she says, "What"? I ask.

A soul,

you idiot,

a soul,

 

that's why I need you. You are my soul

and my heart and my anima, that's why I keep trying

to exterminate you, you know, that's why I have to get

rid of us, it's the only thing that keeps me here. . .

Without you,

                         I'd be free, rampant, I want to break

you into 10000 screaming villages, light you  up in

one howl of outrage, longing, pain, and desire, before

the lights go out, that's why I'm in Gestapo camp, my

little Jew,

 

and I say, "Ok, ok. . . do you want some coffee this

morning?" No, she says, we whoever we are  are not allowed coffee,

we'll drink your blood, my dear. . .

 

 

© Rebecca Seiferle