Tours of the Black Clock

55

TONIGHT I RETURN TO my room and it’s empty. Lauren and Jeanine, Catherine and Janet and Leigh are gone. They understand I no longer want them here; I can’t stand the light. I can’t stand the dark, something drunker than blood courses through me. I’m caught between the sheets of the bed; the light of bombings and parades blots the night outside my window. When it fades I sleep an hour, when I wake I sit up in bed in the dark of the room, and find that the gray Hungarian moon has dropped from the sky over the river, has moved through the circular streets of the city, up the banks of the Wien-Fluss to Dog Storm Street, and dangles now in my window like burst mutant fruit from the low limb of a tree. From some place I can’t see the moon casts a shadow on the left corner of my room and there in the shadow opens a door, and there in the door you are. We’re children. I’m twenty. Your breasts are fifteen, your legs twenty-five, your eyes and vulva ageless, neither old nor born. You’re already becoming what I remember rather than what you are. You step from the doorway of the shadow of the moon, your face only a quarter in light, and I see grow from your womb curling out the tuft of your hair a long wet vine; it precedes you, an umbilical thistle. It grows before you across the floor between us, it winds up the side of the bed. It wraps itself around my feet and up my leg, it coils around my waist and binds my erection. Dog Storm Street creaks with blue carriages, I hear the hooves of white donkeys; lakeless swans slap dead against the walls of houses. The window runs with the juice of the moon, I smell the musk of the steppes beyond the eastern hills. At the end of the long wet vine that winds from the center of you and seizes me is a black flower that grows new petals as soon as it sheds them. In a matter of moments the bed’s covered with black petals, I peel them off my thighs sticky and damp. I know you’re a virgin. I didn’t expect anything else. I didn’t expect you to come to the bed like this and prostrate your pink body across the wet black of the crumbling flower. I can already hear, fifty years from now on your Chinese island, every word of your lies. Every word. I hear them above the songs in slavic belfries, you can fill your mouth with the black flower but nothing stifles the deceit of your denial of me. The flower never stops growing. When I grab you by your wrists and shake you into looking at me, it’s as though I’ve taken a live wire: I’m stunned with your cold voltage. I want to let go but I can’t, it takes your own fingers to pry mine loose; you smile as you do it. I wake later and the bed’s soaked with the dew of the black flower. The vine’s withdrawn back into you, only its marks are left on my legs. You’ve gone back into the door of the gray Hungarian moon and closed it behind you. I sleep again and when I wake the wet of you has coated me. On the desk in the sunlight are these pages that document you were here.