Kyle Muntz - Voices

If this was where we were, then(III)

maybe I’ve been talking to the walls. We pressed against the walls. She felt

more real than a real woman. Her skin too smooth to be real, giving off no heat, she

was all restraint and coolness, the quixotic stranger, riding naked into the sunset,

her glorious silhouette, teasing with well, well sculpted shoulders. Water dripped

down, to puddle gently, florid crispness, ripeness and flowers, a temperate

afternoon in parts of the city where the night never comes, sitting outside,

decorating the curb and watching the cars go by, the suits and ties, briefcases,

schoolbags. We

did kiss, and it was the most unreal kiss of my life. I didn’t know if Ashley was

meant to be touched. I’d never heard of her being real before. Markus knew the

real her, the personification of her: chords, notes on the vibraphone. She was

nothing like a jazz café in the nineteen seventies, drinking cocktails while the day

melted, the saxophone bled, and she wasn’t like the postal service either, who bring

packages, who deliver envelopes, though she brought things. Without getting caught up in innuendo, I can’t

say much can

in fact

say very little. I promised to keep her secrets, I promised to be that one, true release, if that’s anything like what I was. If I told what

it meant to be with her I can’t say. If I

pretended to think honestly I’d just be going back to more innuendo. In breaking my promise, all I can say was it was unreal. She was unreal, breathing. I knew

what it means to keep secrets, and I knew more things than that, reaching, in my

own way, all across vast, cyclic realms of the symbolic wheel, echoing voice… She

was full of surprises, she was capable of being naked. I wondered if this was

anything like the real her, if you could call it that, not just

another element of what it means to be human, representative of the race, the

human species, who do lust, even when they hide it behind alien symbiosis, latching

onto etiquette, her wildness, something resembling IV

She

was full of surprises, but the most surprising thing,

was that she came

first.

::::::::::::::::::::

One

reason

art can only imitate

life

(without recreating)

is that

it

doesn’t capture those moments

in

between.

(though sometimes there isn’t

much reason to

try.)

::::::::::::::::::::

"If anyone asks," Ashley said, "make sure you tell them we did it once." "I thought I was keeping secrets."

She laughed, and might have smiled.

"I don’t have secrets," she said. "You know that."

I said I didn’t want to quit pretending.

"We never quit pretending," she said. "You know that too."

I kissed her again. Her lips didn’t taste real. Like painted plastic, they were full

and fuller, but she never stopped pretending.

::::::::::::::::::::

I had a dream the day before I met Her . She'd gotten to the point of capital letters (not to mention italics ). I woke up (dreaming), in a place where the canals were, under a bridge (I woke in a dream). Beams of light shot through crevices, knifing brighter than belief, and lit a furnace of illumination: cracks, crevices, lichens, underneath the water, a rigorous sea of brightness. There might have been people (I heard their steps, quickly passing), but I couldn’t see them, though for some reason they wore robes, yeah, they must have been wearing robes.

I followed the water. All my life I’ve been good at following things, because I’m a person, and somewhere deep inside I like direction. Instead I followed brightness, not flickering, solidness, a luminescent body, and I found her there, a girl I didn’t know. Transfiguring, she didn’t have a real, permanent face, a true, rigorous self. She just was, and she was everything else too, all at once.

"What’s your name?" I asked.

When she wouldn’t tell, I wasn’t surprised.

:::::::::::::::::::: Veronica looked different today, less like herself, in that she wasn’t so there, and she wasn’t wearing heels. When I showed up she tasted me tentatively, the way you kiss a stranger, no the way you kiss a friend. Scents, she smelled like expensive perfume, essence of the rain.

"I missed you," I said. I did. But what was. She gave me nothing to deny. She was herself, but she was easy to love. Distinguished, mysterious, she kept her own secrets. Therefore, to who I am, keeper of knowing.

If you want, she said, we could make a video.

She bent her head, and leaned against the wall. Her angular hips, the set of her, feline, delirious, strenuous, she reminded me of adolescent lusts, of the earliness of memory, thinking of her. All my life I’d been keeping secrets, no, just a kind of individual knowledge, of myself, that she let me preserve. Dark markings accented her, lash and pupil, denouncing vision. If I asked, maybe we could run away together, to an oasis in the desert where water cools the flames… she could be my desert oasis, haunting spiritualist dream. Not that which I know, all that was she. Weakness, beauty, we could run away to the desert, and bathe in perfect, perfect flame, scouring, a tempestuous sun- devouring- streams to set free… If she’d asked I would have gone, I knew, we could keep secrets someplace away from this city (streets, cafés) where no one understands poetry. If she asked we could go… we might have gone.

"If you want," she said, "we could make a video." She asked the wrong questions. No, she just didn’t ask the same way, assaulting, refraction: thinly, making slopes and shapeliness, a band of skin below her shirt. I’d never realized she was taller than I am. I could touch her, maybe I could, feeling, she would let me. Was that it, really, what it meant to diffuse into her, she making returns, an energetic linkage. I relinquished vision. It remembered her.

I didn’t have to see up her skirt anymore. We made our own vision of loveliness. She let me touch her. I didn’t have to pay.

::::::::::::::::::::

The city never sleeps. Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong here, where even the natural is made of plastic. Dissonant, distance and misrepresentation. I couldn’t sleep. I clung to the idea of being an enigma, but the world didn’t have a place for anonymity either. Linkage. A maze of advertisements and hanging black wires.

I met him again in the park, a mystery. Phallic connotations demarked him, something to do with gender perception, linguistic in the social pathos, (deeper than slang and last week’s scandal). Dissonant, preconceived, he confused me. "You’re the one who gave me my camera, right?"

He looked at me strangely, and asked what I meant. I couldn’t make out his

face. Shadows stretched from brow to the line of the nose. Yellow beams obscured him. Shifting in his seat, maybe he thought about sitting down. He looked back at me. Maybe he knew, what things given, a possession not taken away. I’d never thought of meeting him again, not here in the dark, but passing obscures the prophetic, and bleeds it to dreams.

After standing a moment longer, he said maybe he had.

"Do you have it now?"

I always have it.

A night bird flew. Deranged old men, wielding canes and crooked back walkers,

stumbled in the sideways, swearing under their breath, growing patches of hair on their upper lips. The moon hid behind clouds, not looking down on the city. We gave it no rest, a haunting to go on ten million years. Maybe someday I could see the moon, rising up, to make amends for humanity. But nothing comes through that blurring curtain.

"Want to go somewhere?" he asked. "I feel like a trip into the forest." "But there isn’t really a forest there," I said. "They just want it to look like a forest, to keep up appearances, but twenty feet in the trees stop, and you come out the other side. Even nature isn’t real anymore."