(Rive Gauche Pour Homme Eau de Toilette (Discontinued))

John Luna
 

(I.)

The parents were the first body to move. Like a muscle with blood… this incredibly vital relationship with an audience, which was of course we few. Just calculating the ratios in the midst of their art was exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. Your body will eventually require the grace of the rooms in which you conceived its lives.

Each time I go down into the basement to let out the dog, I leaf through the books, scanning Perrault’s “Bluebeard” or the cover of Greene’s Power and the Glory. Imagine how much harder it would be if blindfolded by history’s being perceived in a line rather than as a staircase ending at a sagging pocket door where the wind is seeping in. Picture dark corridors coated in dulled white lead enamel & the plastic muskiness of containers for another life’s long irony & their aura; each page a quatrain, the best, the cream, condensed like those yearbooks in navy sleeves.

Geranium tang sings an exhausted carpet dusted with debris: a face awaiting the razor’s skipping-cricket gait; grit-scaping, sagacious, dryly whistling oneself clean; the whole scene the thesis of The School of Athens flashed as diminishing returns towards the three-fold bathroom cabinet mirror, seamed in steam; smooth equivocation of truth and beauty advertised with praiseworthy virtù disclosed to squinting light lately rising from still pines beyond our drive.

Belted into vintage trench coat static-electrical field’s sweeping fall of leaves, Baroque gestures suggestive of crimes against time. Flip-flops, wishes in the days’ shadows under airplanes, picketed with symmetry; robins, hums. What a strange thing to happen to a little boy. Heredity is a long game… Somebody has to put up a stake, and somebody has to take care how it’s paced; lest the lesser is more the morrow. Familiar caricature and truth-telling citation are both important in this sense, as kind regards, best wishes and yours truly. And must it mean if a star nestles into a night like a field of rustling ferns, dry as a pill, resting on the pile of newly-laundered cotton sheet, or a breeze attaching itself to the crown of nail-studded suede, of a freshly buzzed, untroubled head?

Heavyweight the light between elements of doubt & sorcery mixed into Rothko’s suicide cocktail (outside: “yes” whispers of cars and trees, blurred & whirled.) Your unconscious life right now is informed by the movies: a veritable Valhalla of frozen-in-the-open fears, magazine flesh crawling over collaged moonscape floor: under the same night-light, blazing-white pillars of books bathed in sweat, pale parapets of lean and shadow; the strength of any dream being in the effective use of mixed metaphor commuted to thoughts in forespoken, doped-up prosody’s lore. In a mirror, for instance, you noted the writing on your mirror-right hand that read: “left handed gods”, the sign-off from a friend’s letter rendering protective blessing. The past will stay in the past, its aim is an imperfect tense. I’m going to ask you to stay out loud so I can live with myself. We are all so deep in dysfunction, a synthetic lubricant, in this particular winter transmission to be palpably endured by the generations in generous gradations, while the mirror-flexed eye of the shower knob stands as moving observer to my betraying and praying and ultimately staying, as though about to move away from something…fixedly contemplating… turned towards the past. And here we are (coming) back to where we stand; the knight always wins (cellphone message dings.)

(ii.)

If it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt at all; become your own guardian. If there was another chance, the whole leftover game to play or one more day of conversations to mate, I’d glean. It could happen here, in the midst of the quiet summers you while away sweetly mapping, tracing, watching, reckoning – but won’t. The fridge crackles cool, consuming fuel. In the beginning, in the work-world of childhood-in-the-making, it was dark; picture people leaving the lights on in late summer evening. You can hear the lawn mowing sounds so you know it must still be warm; but these are means of egress, there are no machines to speak to this.

(But still, you know a Tuesday from a Saturday;) you are a natural as the absent-minded sky over the open-air theatre of asking why. See how much practice it takes the dog to wait out her silhouette on the floor? Gather up some laurels (would it kill you to try?) There, resting on the stove, see the tray for someone’s sick-day meal. Convalescence lasts and lasts, as some discomfort’s due, while a melancholy that never actually ceases getting started settles in to cause furniture to creak and the cat to stretch & shake. See now how with a freshly extinguished match held in your mouth, rolled over on the tongue and beginning to flake, you will taste the warmed wax from the candle knowing in your nose’s memory-banks what it objectively was, explained back by way of quoted soot & grit & bitter wood. Flowers flow uphill as we run from shadows as the sun’s carbonizing math melts pools of silver-grey snow between our worn-in hedge + house.

Erstwhile, you emerge in the doorway to ask if we are planning a vacation. My voice drops an octave, as this is the where and why of it, but idly. There are interesting things to pick out of the day’s accounts; so many to prolong conversation’s end until we’ve both become old men.

 

 

John Luna: I am a dual Canadian-American citizen born of Mexican + American expatriates. Besides writing, my practice is as a visual artist whose background includes painting, sculpture and installation, and a teacher working in the areas of art, design and art history. I currently reside on an island off of the west coast of N. America. Previous publication of written work in art criticism and poetry has appeared in Ditch, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Canyon, Cordite, and Matrix, among others. A first collection of poems, Listing (Decoupage Publishing, 2015) was released through a small independent press with the help of a crowdfunding campaign. A second book-length manuscript was recently (2017) shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.