Love Without End Amen

The stone city below us through the windows blue at night, my white shoulders, my white face transposed across it by the glass like somebody dead; like bloody, bloody Mary in the mirror at midnight: patron saint of my scarlet life.

Behind me from the bed he reaches for me. I like the dark hair on his forearms, the white hair on his chest. The bones in his feet and his dimples. His hands, though, are too soft and floury--long palmed like a monkey, repulsive. Earlier, dancing, his hands around my shoulders, my belly, my neck like a constrictor. In my hair, and breathing me, this older man, saying the things everybody says.

My head is a bell.

Kiss me harder, I say. My hand behind his head I pull his hair. He can kiss harder but it isn't enough--I want to feel his bones, I want it to hurt, I want his skin to be rough, for him to hold me like a man. But he can't and it isn't. There is a solution. I always find the solution.

The bartender smiles, he pours like an angel.

You should be back here with me, he says. You look lonesome.

You don't look much better.

Which is why you should be back here with me, he says, tries to touch my hand.

I find this beautiful girl with Chinese eyes. Her hair is smooth, all of a piece, sliding around like something out of the ocean. Why men, I am thinking. We dance hips together, her soft thighs—the smell of lanolin, cinnamon, honey chapstick. Her shining two lips.

Then her man comes up and steals her away--and James comes from behind me--the men pulling us apart while we are still looking at each other, and now James wants to go. And why the fuck not--why not anything. Why not everything?

He's eating something and I take it out of his hands--anything you want, he tells me, I will give you anything you want.

There is nothing that I want, I tell him.

If somebody doesn't know what they want you can't trust them, he says. They could do anything.

We are back in the room and talking drunken all night. You know it's just as easy to love a rich man, he says.

Why did I come here? This is not what I want, I'm pretending, I'm proving something--what, that I don't hurt? That I can also kiss someone unimportant whom I do not love or know, that I'm fine without you? I cannot believe anything will ever be good again.

I fall asleep--wake up and he is loudly pretending to sleep. I hate him, the juvenile, the idiot, veils all fallen away and everything four o’clock naked. He pulls me back into bed, against him, his coarse forearms which I like, holds me & we close our eyes, he starts talking about all the things. A girl like me. What he'd like to do together. What it would be like to wake up and see my face, what it would be like to leave me and go to a meeting and then come back to me again, my face still there. With my eyes closed he could be anyone.

We could be anyone anywhere, eyes closed making promises without the intention of ever keeping. The game that we are two innocents, and not liars, that we are brave, rational, as happy as we pretend to be.

I want fire. I want to be burned alive, to be eaten alive, never to feel. I want a lover to grab me to hold me and hurt me, to split me open, make me feel, make me dead.

In the morning with our eyes open we get ready, walking around comfortable and indifferent. He orders green tea and juice, we read the paper, we walk outside together for him to show me the city, pleasure in talking about the history of things but something inside me dropping forever like a stone.

I am falling forever, there is nothing and no one to catch me and there never was.

We go to the top of another hotel for breakfast. Do you like the vista, he asks me.

Yes, I say. Paper bags and seagulls in the air, elevators sliding up and down outside the buildings, the red bridge unfolded, the prison entrenched upon the sea, the men in the street. A boy my age sitting behind us, tapping on his laptop, and I am ashamed.

What are you thinking, I ask him.

I'm thinking how I'd like to kiss you, he says. We finish breakfast and walking away he does: tilting my chin, feeling my ribs and my smallness the way that N. used to, finding me out. (memories of our smallness seven years ago in my first apartment, N.'s dear face saying I want you to have my babies, I never want you apart from me. Endlessness, I want to own you. I want you against me when we are old and the blood doesn't move anymore. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I believed. I ate his promises and hung them like a light between my ribs. They will extract the promises like the brains from a mummy--thread them out through my nose, place them delicate into a jar by my body for someday to find.)

I turn my face away--James kisses my neck. In the elevator my neck and my shoulders, his hands in my hair, and I push into him, wanting to be punished to be shamed. I deserve to feel this fucking way. This is what I wanted. This is what I wanted. I have done nothing wrong. These are not anything but kisses. I have responsibilities to no one. No one has responsibilities to me. We are all adults here.

He has a meeting. I'll meet you here at one for lunch, he says, and goes out. I print my boarding passes in the lobby, think about taking a cab and leaving without goodbye. Instead, because I'm there, I walk outside, I go to shops. The people pretend they do not see me and that I cannot see them. We are one million blind men.

And that was me crying in the streets of San Francisco, silent in the bright white sunshine of a white morning, white bricks and people relaxed in their jackets not seeing me. Seagulls and plastic bags, women selling plastic bangles, colored scarves. I am alive.

I am anesthetized I am lost I am alive. I am leaving just as I came in. My burning heart, my sacred body, this world my pyre, these words are smoke, there is nothing which exists.

Reading the Book of Serenity on the flight home, I fall asleep and dream in koans:

The teacher to his attendant: bring me me the rhinoceros fan.

The student, shamefaced: that fan is broken.

So the fan is broken. Bring me then the rhinoceros, says his teacher.

What can you say? There is nothing you can say.

The teacher draws a circle in the dirt. Inside the circle he writes with his finger: rhino

--so, friend, you are broken. Walk not forwards but backwards. Walk back to your original nature, to your natural self, to your face before you were born: the source of the fan.

N. hands me back my heart. He walks away and I am at the center of all things alone, the darkness alone, and this is where I came from, my love, my sweetest friend, the days before you pulled me out, and this is what I am made from: darkness and water and female softness. Yin lady, orange moon, temple's priestess.
I sing the song of myself.