Iridescence
Iridescence is in the feathers of a starling, is on an old penny, on the frosting of a lightbulb, soap bubbles, puddles of rain on black tar, fingerprints on a crystal vase, powder on moth wings. Rare occurrence in a dramatic world, the subtlety of shifting blues and greens, a swirl that changes with your breath across a dome of water stretched through air. The eyes of a fly, fractured into geometric specks, like atoms of a molecule, are iridescent, and never close. Ringed snake scales become green and red above the black, iridescent. The back of a flea, the humped brown shell around a universe of hairy mouths and legs, the oily smooth body designed for flight through air, head down, across furless space ...
***
A day and a night outside of Why, Arizona, on a somewhat hilltop, the top of the world as truly everywhere is. In the glittering noon the yellow earth curves its cracked body over the edge. All around the yellow curves; the sky curves into the moving curve of the earth.
A cloud of sagebrush, a pair of jackrabbit ears, the eye-corner lizards darting for cooler inches of afternoon.
I wet a bandanna and it dries as I put it around my neck.
A clump of prickly pear cactus lifts a single spiny violet bloom, a flower as large as my palm. Slowly the sticky purple fingers close and night drifts into a curve of sky. The stars lean down near the horizon. One bent shack in the distance, incredible and unexplained, is lit inside by yellow light; I watch black forms pass the kitchen window, a door opens. Out leaps a dog, bounding away through clumps of sage. Before him is the random, sideways shadow of a rabbit; I can feel the tremors their feet make in the cooling sand.
***
In the dream I walk through the ruins of a city in my brown skin. I find tin cans, bottle caps, pieces of colored plastic, orange peels, nails, broken dishes, metal wire. I find a tool with a sharp point and make holes in the pieces, string them together with wire, wrap the wire around the nails; these baubles shine in the sun. I hang them on my body, through my hair, and walk across the sand of the desert, going toward the oasis. Everything is very still.
Perhaps I can fashion a camel out of dead animals, the head of a dog, the legs of a horse, sew fur together across several cat bodies to make the back, open the dead mouth and breathe into the rotting cavern, the black spotty tongue, decaying withered gums, dried blood, breathe life into my camel and watch him rise on shaky legs. I will ride him across the Mojave, the desert shimmering, my bangles rattling heavy on my neck, shining in the sun. I will make a spear from a rusty tin can, with a rock I will pound the metal sharp. Sway of the camel, slight give of the sand, turn of the earth. Out to the oasis where my camel, under atree, in the shade, dips his head to the water and drinks long, long.
***
At the kitchen table my mother says, "I would hate to regret the things I didn't do. I'd hate to be old, sitting and thinking of everything I wish I'd done. I'd much rather regret the things I did do than the things I didn't."
Three years later I visit her at the hospital's mental ward; I cannot wake her. She is lying in her clothes on the bed, mouth drawn apart and crooked, eyes open in sleep. The nurse leads me to a white and grey room with cafeteria tables of shiny formica. The other patients sit playing Gin, smoking, staring with fearful eyes. One woman is bent double, her head almost to her knees, twisting her eyebrows with both hands.
I wait and at last the nurse brings my mother in. Fuzzy-tongued, querulous, she asks what day it is.
"Is this the day my daughter is leaving?"
I nod and her face, the room, warps with salt water in my eyes.
She shuffles back to her room. I hear her throwing books, an alarm clock, pill bottles clothing. A cup of cold coffee sits on the linoleum floor; the surface is iridescent.
***
"Saskia," I say, I'm strung out and my voice echoes in my head, not like empty room echoing or auditorium echoing across rows of plush cushioned seats, red carpeteing, chandeliers, black doors, footprints on the floor where the usher would be -- "I hope you know what you're doing."
Echoing like a breath exhaled in a cavern in an ocean rock, a cave with only one entrance which is though an underwater passage. You swim out and dive into the darkness of the cold sea, feeling with fingertips along the barnicled stone, holding your breath, not knowing how much longer, how much longer it will be before you can or must breathe again. Finding the indentation, following it blindly with your fingers to the opening and pulling yourself in, the tunnel widening around you, jagged rock under your hands, following the rock walls up and up, breath contracting in your lungs, bones, muscles weak, chest aching, taste of salt -- and then the water is thin as rippling glass above you and your head breaks through. You exhale and gasp in, hair sticking to your face, seaweed between your teeth.
Saskia is bent over the candle. She heats the spoon until it makes tiny bubbling sounds. I tie the bandanna over my elbow, pulling it tight with my teeth.
Saskia is drawing clear liquid into the syringe. She holds it to the candle and peers; thorugh it her face is distorted. She flicks a tube with a quick finger and bubbles rise.
"Make a fist."
I grip my fingers and she slide sthe metal into my skin, I only feel it on the surface, then she is done, turning to wipe the spoon. The ocean washes over my ears, I dissove and become the sea, I stretch like a slow starfish across the rounded earth, feel gravity sucking me into the center, feel the moon draw me upward in waves. I roll and crash, wash against ice cliffs of Antarctica, spread over the shores of Africa, the yellow sand of yellow Australia.
Saskia is trying to get me to sit up but I keep turning into the ocean, I curl cold against abalone shells. She opens my mouth and her head disappears inside. She reaches for a screwdriver or a hammer or a pair of pliers, attaches it to my mouth, grips my jaw. Bracing herself with a hand on my forehead she pulls, twists, strains backward, all I see is the dirty soles of bare feet. Then she reappears, triumphant, grinning and holding up the tooth.
***
Once I stepped on a frog by mistake, all its coiled insides lay wet and glistening on the wet grass and the sound the frog made was almost like a kiss. How to put it back together, make it whole? The silver spots on the green skin shine iridescent, the gold eyes are painless with amazement. I sit up in the night, holding my ribs together. Living is iridescence. This is all I am, this piece of alive, only this and nowhere else beyond the curved edge of skin. A clock ticks in the stillness of a caught breath. This is all I know.
***
A day and a night outside of Why, Arizona, on a somewhat hilltop, the top of the world as truly everywhere is. In the glittering noon the yellow earth curves its cracked body over the edge. All around the yellow curves; the sky curves into the moving curve of the earth.
A cloud of sagebrush, a pair of jackrabbit ears, the eye-corner lizards darting for cooler inches of afternoon.
I wet a bandanna and it dries as I put it around my neck.
A clump of prickly pear cactus lifts a single spiny violet bloom, a flower as large as my palm. Slowly the sticky purple fingers close and night drifts into a curve of sky. The stars lean down near the horizon. One bent shack in the distance, incredible and unexplained, is lit inside by yellow light; I watch black forms pass the kitchen window, a door opens. Out leaps a dog, bounding away through clumps of sage. Before him is the random, sideways shadow of a rabbit; I can feel the tremors their feet make in the cooling sand.
***
In the dream I walk through the ruins of a city in my brown skin. I find tin cans, bottle caps, pieces of colored plastic, orange peels, nails, broken dishes, metal wire. I find a tool with a sharp point and make holes in the pieces, string them together with wire, wrap the wire around the nails; these baubles shine in the sun. I hang them on my body, through my hair, and walk across the sand of the desert, going toward the oasis. Everything is very still.
Perhaps I can fashion a camel out of dead animals, the head of a dog, the legs of a horse, sew fur together across several cat bodies to make the back, open the dead mouth and breathe into the rotting cavern, the black spotty tongue, decaying withered gums, dried blood, breathe life into my camel and watch him rise on shaky legs. I will ride him across the Mojave, the desert shimmering, my bangles rattling heavy on my neck, shining in the sun. I will make a spear from a rusty tin can, with a rock I will pound the metal sharp. Sway of the camel, slight give of the sand, turn of the earth. Out to the oasis where my camel, under atree, in the shade, dips his head to the water and drinks long, long.
***
At the kitchen table my mother says, "I would hate to regret the things I didn't do. I'd hate to be old, sitting and thinking of everything I wish I'd done. I'd much rather regret the things I did do than the things I didn't."
Three years later I visit her at the hospital's mental ward; I cannot wake her. She is lying in her clothes on the bed, mouth drawn apart and crooked, eyes open in sleep. The nurse leads me to a white and grey room with cafeteria tables of shiny formica. The other patients sit playing Gin, smoking, staring with fearful eyes. One woman is bent double, her head almost to her knees, twisting her eyebrows with both hands.
I wait and at last the nurse brings my mother in. Fuzzy-tongued, querulous, she asks what day it is.
"Is this the day my daughter is leaving?"
I nod and her face, the room, warps with salt water in my eyes.
She shuffles back to her room. I hear her throwing books, an alarm clock, pill bottles clothing. A cup of cold coffee sits on the linoleum floor; the surface is iridescent.
***
"Saskia," I say, I'm strung out and my voice echoes in my head, not like empty room echoing or auditorium echoing across rows of plush cushioned seats, red carpeteing, chandeliers, black doors, footprints on the floor where the usher would be -- "I hope you know what you're doing."
Echoing like a breath exhaled in a cavern in an ocean rock, a cave with only one entrance which is though an underwater passage. You swim out and dive into the darkness of the cold sea, feeling with fingertips along the barnicled stone, holding your breath, not knowing how much longer, how much longer it will be before you can or must breathe again. Finding the indentation, following it blindly with your fingers to the opening and pulling yourself in, the tunnel widening around you, jagged rock under your hands, following the rock walls up and up, breath contracting in your lungs, bones, muscles weak, chest aching, taste of salt -- and then the water is thin as rippling glass above you and your head breaks through. You exhale and gasp in, hair sticking to your face, seaweed between your teeth.
Saskia is bent over the candle. She heats the spoon until it makes tiny bubbling sounds. I tie the bandanna over my elbow, pulling it tight with my teeth.
Saskia is drawing clear liquid into the syringe. She holds it to the candle and peers; thorugh it her face is distorted. She flicks a tube with a quick finger and bubbles rise.
"Make a fist."
I grip my fingers and she slide sthe metal into my skin, I only feel it on the surface, then she is done, turning to wipe the spoon. The ocean washes over my ears, I dissove and become the sea, I stretch like a slow starfish across the rounded earth, feel gravity sucking me into the center, feel the moon draw me upward in waves. I roll and crash, wash against ice cliffs of Antarctica, spread over the shores of Africa, the yellow sand of yellow Australia.
Saskia is trying to get me to sit up but I keep turning into the ocean, I curl cold against abalone shells. She opens my mouth and her head disappears inside. She reaches for a screwdriver or a hammer or a pair of pliers, attaches it to my mouth, grips my jaw. Bracing herself with a hand on my forehead she pulls, twists, strains backward, all I see is the dirty soles of bare feet. Then she reappears, triumphant, grinning and holding up the tooth.
***
Once I stepped on a frog by mistake, all its coiled insides lay wet and glistening on the wet grass and the sound the frog made was almost like a kiss. How to put it back together, make it whole? The silver spots on the green skin shine iridescent, the gold eyes are painless with amazement. I sit up in the night, holding my ribs together. Living is iridescence. This is all I am, this piece of alive, only this and nowhere else beyond the curved edge of skin. A clock ticks in the stillness of a caught breath. This is all I know.
posted by Asher Abrams at 1:52 PM
<< Home