LIVE AT THE WITCH TRIALS

Massachusetts. 1977. They remained like that for some time, the Sylvia doll and the Anne doll, silent as dumbbells strung on the transparent umbilicus of jealousy and desire that twitched between them across the dining table. They were like twins. I stood behind them in turn, lowering my nostrils into the oblivion of their hair, Sylvia still scented from her small Auschwitz, Anne retaining her scent of imploding racetracks. Sylvia cast me a glance that she did not want me to see, but in that glance Bibles wrecked on black Atlantic rocks like black dresses torn on broken cocktail glasses and ravens rolled in white, empty tombs. She hadn’t even touched her sandwiches. I kissed Anne full on the mouth, even though she was only eighteen inches tall, and I knew it wasn’t going to work.

The second time I meant to write it out. Anne and I lit matches and struggled with our memories to pick our way through a blacked-out city. We were in the part of the city where the trucks are vented for screaming animals. But the city was still. We fought to hold the yellow glimpses we caught of it, like beer running through cupped hands. She handed me her cigarette as I slid my hand into her flank, pushing nylon into the exclamation mark of her ass. The dark was terrible. This is how it is before you commit suicide, she explained. Everyone else appears to be dead before you. There is no light.

We made our way inside the cocktail lounge of a hotel where dead people lolled against pianos, their bodies like splitting fruit, entire parties suspended in gas. We stole a bottle of gin and swam out into the street, climbing through the window of a parked car. Her glossy heels tore the headliner as I lay on top of her, spraying stars into her mouth. But Sylvia was missing. She stared at what I had written as though her eyelids were fanned with teeth.

 

Poets are more interesting than poetry. You probably think of me as blasphemous, and the truth is that I am not much of a reader. I do not like to read. Reading is like finishing someone else’s painting. But a painting or a television will radiate into a room unbidden. There is nothing worse than the sneer of closed books. A book is a dead bird that you are expected to bury. I remember when Sylvia and I watched From Here to Eternity on television, and we lay down on the carpet in front of the scrolling metallic waves that flashed over Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr as they rolled on the beach; we were their mirror. She pulled my cock out and milked it all over her tweed skirt, her blouse open over one raging fuchsia nipple, and her skin subterranean pale beneath the coal mist of her stockings. She was something I had pulled from beneath the earth. The wind blew in from the white-hearted water. Anne thrashed at a typewriter in the next room, a firing squad of words.

 

It seems so distant from me now. But I do remember. They disintegrated in their quiet way, the way dolls will, without hysteria. I became ashamed of playing with suicides, waiting for the dolls to act while I was out of the room. I once put a wine glass outside on the window ledge of my apartment, above the street. It stayed there for a long time, as I would go out on my errands, and otherwise turn my back on it. I knew one day it would fall, and perhaps it would fall and do great damage, raining viciously into a baby carriage, or, perhaps, it would fall on me, the stem protruding from my brow beside the hot dog stand. Eventually, I brought the glass back in from the ledge. I wanted awful things to happen to people or, rather, to me. Nothing ever did. I never got caught fucking my poet dolls. I was never fired from work for masturbating with them in the ladies’ room. I lived in my mind, like you do, in Smith College or Glenside Hospital.

BROOKLYN. 1977. Inside the perfumed coat, in the shadow cast by mannerisms and mode, under the fur collar, behind the monocle of shilling gin, I negotiated the snowy barbarism of the city. I was nothing more than a stem of glass, transparent, hollow, and skinny. The city threatened me because he was a narcissist, a flower blooming in frosted black tar. I waited in restaurants like Lucifer in a church, goosing boys and sucking paté from my fingers. Fear perforated my lungs. My coat pockets were plump with my latest sex drawings, and my hair betrayed me. My hair was awful because I was an artist. I carried little flesh, just angles and bone. My eyes faced inward, showing their backs, mother-of-pearl, a few coils of gore and a flash of blue. Because I was an artist, no one ever saw my eyes. Because I was a coward, involuntarily I closed my eyelids when I spoke.