#aprilbernard

BY APRIL BERNARD

White, smudged like pastel on paper, like the orchard May-blurred on the hillside White like the light in the door as it opens

White as the robes of T’ang mourners in the scroll where the landscape slides into script, vertical calendar of a dead man’s life

White as the page these lines sit upon puckering the rice paper with brush-strokes that this side, the side that is life, has drawn

Gone into light he is now everywhere light is I see and reach but my hands are thick with shadow

He left in spring light He threw blessings like stars of shattered blossoms on our sleeves and hair

It is not that I would drag him back —

I ask instead that the scent of light carry forward this moment and the next that the brush meet the paper not as blot but as sign

So what was formerly shadow may become a whiteness White in the light of the door as it opens, blossom of light perpetual in all places we yet go

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman on the set of the film Notorious in 1946

  I think I hate Ben Hecht, or Hitchcock, or myself

for surely we are the ones who made those lovers dance badly, fiercely, in Notorious, where I discovered myself

a long time ago, before I learned the finish of the dance could never be a box-office-pleasing slow dissolve to kissing. No; my dance like theirs properly never ends, it is a danse

apache to the death, so much violence to reason in lovers kissing and sighing, because they love because it's impossible, and pretending a happy ending is just an excuse for more kissing.

My mouth, his mouth, to the Brazilian sway and bite of impossibly tender jaws, jewels and fingernails incising the shadows intimate with jacaranda and darker smells, we lovers who believe love possible

as temporary proposition only; who can be intimate with the flesh, we ask, when we are already intimate with death? Flesh deliquesces, first with desire, then with death. I can't intimate to another even by words where my passions knife- skate on the edge of death, cool on the checkered floor of dissolution. Not being able to love for long--now that's the knife

to run your fingertip along, as maracas shakey-shake; here's a solution to every "fat-headed guy full of pain" who never would say, "I'm a fat-headed guy full of pain," a dissolution

of dolce de leche to bile noir on the tongue of my own ever- loving self. When I say it's "all a lot of hooey," I mean forgive me. I mean it's doomed for never.

Literature and the lesser candy-land arts filled me with that hooey to which a daddy's girl succumbs for ever more: The love like a slap, the slap called love, the furious refusal: Hooey.

Did you know that Cary Grant loved me even more than he loved Ingrid Bergman? His eyes, black vortices in the samba night, found me, there, in my dark, and promised me nothing more.