by Dale Peck
Summer
Germination was a tender touching process, soon over: seeds split like broken zippers, shoots push into darkness, trusting that this way lies the sun. Growth seems a funny purposeless thing until suddenly the closed petals of lust burst open, revealing the naked desire of need and want, of love. In your thirst you drink the poisoned blood of the one you have named lover. In your hunger you lick the shit from his ass and the pus from his sores and the fungus that grows in his eyes and mouth and feet and fingers. His drool is your faucet, his piss your shower, his cum marks the end of your days. You take the pain of his every illness and injury inside you; a thousand times you take the seed of death from him and let it bloom within your body. In the end the strength of the need of your love exhausts him, chokes him as the vine chokes the tree. He withers within your grasp, and together you crumple to the ground.
Fall
He will call you when the crows fly thick through the night. You will go out and walk under cover of darkness and falling feathers and caw-caw-cawing for carrion. There will be neither light to see nor air to breathe nor room in the thick atmosphere to push out words, and the only thing you can trust is his hand in yours. Its bones are thin, frail, light, the bones of a bird, and they pull you on and on, past your town, past the farms that surround your town, into the empty uncultivated fields that lie beyond the farms. In long cold dry grass he will lay you down, and his hands fluttering across the expanse of your skin are a bellows, blowing away your clothes, igniting the coals that, for him, are always smoldering in your body. He has given birth to you once again, and now you reach for him and attempt to mirror his passion: he kisses you and you open your mouth, he ties your arms to the ground with grass and you don’t pull against the weak roots, he lifts your legs and aims his cock at your asshole. The muscles in your ass shiver and try to pull him inside of you but before he lets you have him he plays a language game. “An exaltation of larks,” he spits into your ear, “an ostentation of peacocks, a pride of lions.” He lifts his head then, and you see that he is looking at the dark shapes flying overhead. “A murder of crows!” you scream, and he fucks you then, and morning never comes. And if that’s not love it will have to do, until the real thing comes along.
Winter
You lost him one night in a tangle of sheets. He disappeared into a drift of snow and was consumed by a pile of paper. When the white had finally finished its task you found yourself with only frozen toes and a damp hollow in your bed. Yesterday’s news is your only information. Cheap sentiments fill your mind, false memories in which your life together is reduced to a discount vacation package of pastoral picnics, Caribbean cruises, and sweet lustless sex. Outside your window the world is frozen solid; the only movements are signs of further decay. Tree limbs snap in the wind, squirrels eat their frostbitten toes in a vain effort to stay alive. This stillness is your only consolation, for you tell yourself that as long as the world remains motionless you will move no farther from him than you already are. Cold comfort, this, for when he left you his leaving was absolute. Eventually you leave your bed, your bedroom, your home: you cover the white skin that covers your body with clothing and walk into the fields west of your house. They are bare now, covered with frosty soil so hard that it chips under your feet like shale. But these fields aren’t fallow. Last fall you watched the farmer plant his wheat, and during the warm afternoons you could almost see it grow. When the frost came it died, but you know that all it awaits is the spring thaw, when it will burst from the ground. In the middle of all this you stand. You watch the slow minuet of objects and shadows. Your own shadow curls around your body like a vine as the moon moves through the sky. I watch you from the other side of the window. If you ever come back I will tell you what I can see from here, which perhaps you cannot. For your lover, Gordon, you are the frozen earth. The façade of death is only temporary, and I promise you that one day you will both be born again.
5. Sex
You find yourself in a foreign country, in a bar. Atmospheric details claim your attention: blaring music and clouds of smoke and the funk of sweat and stale beer. Dim lights seem to be absorbed by dark wooden walls, and you have to squint to read numbers on unfamiliar currency. Cold bottle in hand, you mount a few steps to a raised platform at the back of the bar where the men are waiting. They are familiar, as are their codes; it’s only their words you don’t understand. You communicate through their leather and your leather, through the dark blue handkerchief dangling from the right rear pocket of your jeans and the sanded white patches in the bulging crotches of theirs, through the medium of the bar itself, which has many functions but no other purpose than to facilitate this communication. Men stare at you and you at them, they note your details and you theirs. Some wear collars and some carry leashes, some—including some who really shouldn’t—are bareassed in chaps, and others wear protruding codpieces. There is no subtlety to this code and there isn’t supposed to be; there is just a set of obvious correspondences to memorize, to offer up or respond to. Yellow means piss, brown shit, black and blue, well, they mean black and blue, and more individual concerns—how dominant is dominant, how submissive submissive—are communicated through the strength of a stare or the coyness of an averted glance, through bearing, through signals that, even if you spoke the language here, you would still pick up on. When do you notice the dark narrow descending stairway at the back of the bar? You’re not sure. It’s been in your peripheral vision for some time now, registered like a cataract by your eye but not your mind. Once you see it your eyes keep returning to it. Men go down; they don’t seem to come back up; but you don’t go down. You make yourself wait, drink another beer, and then another. You let yourself imagine, just a little, what might be going on below you, and you move closer so that you smell more clearly the sex smell, hear occasionally a slap or a groan. Finally you go down, one steep step at a time. Immediately it’s darker: walls and pipes and other things register only as motionless shadows, men as moving ones. They are stripped now of even the simple code you were able to observe upstairs. The first thing you realize is that this doesn’t bother you, and the second thing you realize is that it’s actually a continuation of what was happening above: here, in this bar, you and these men are losing individuality, becoming more and more alike, images that reflect each other in one sense and, in another, partially discrete pieces, like tentacles, of some larger whole that is represented most clearly by the bar but that is not, you feel, confined to the bar itself; and the third thing you realize is that someone is running his hand along the crack of your ass. For an instant you surrender and push into the hand, listening to the sounds of other men, watching their coupling shadows, but then you pull away and move deeper into the basement. You walk through the network of small rooms and narrow hallways, thinking as you go that with a little paint, better lighting, several well-placed area rugs—on second thought, better make that wall-to-wall—this could be a nice place to live. When you have made your way through all the rooms and all the men you find a place to stand, and stand there. The men who had been close to you move closer. You look into blank faces at expressions you can’t make out and offer a smile to the man nearest you—a tall man, broad shouldered, with long white arms and big hands encased in black gloves—but then you realize he probably can’t see your smile, so you offer him your body instead. You press up against him and feel the hair on his chest and his soft flat stomach, and probe at the hidden message of his leather-coated crotch. You’re prepared to back away if he indicates that he doesn’t want you but he stands firm, and when you have fitted your body as tightly to his as you can he places one hand on your ass and the other on your head. He tips your head back and kisses you, surprising you with a short moustache and a long smoky tongue, and then he works his fingers as deeply into your ass as your jeans will let him. Then he stops and pulls his hands from your body. He holds one of them up and squints at what appears to be a piece of cloth. It’s your handkerchief, you realize, and h
e realizes, and he runs it gently but firmly over your face, wiping away sweat and spittle, pausing several times when he passes it over your eyes until you realize what he wants and press into the cloth. Why didn’t he simply ask you? It’s not just because you don’t hear anyone talking. This man, you realize, won’t ask you what you like, or tell you what to do, or name you in his language Friday or Tonto or Toby. He won’t use words: he will only use you, as you want to be used. Then he blindfolds you. He presses you against his body as you had pressed against it. With your eyes covered it’s a new beginning: he’s completely in charge. He kisses you again, grabs your ass again. He moves your limbs around as though you were a puppet, pushing your head as far back on your neck as it will go, pulling your hands above your head to remove your shirt, kicking your legs wide and grabbing your crotch. You let yourself be pushed and pulled and kicked; you notice less what happens to your body than what his hands do to it. As long as he’s touching you, you are centered, you are safe, you are home. It’s only when he doesn’t touch you that you feel naked, or alone, or silly, and not even the panting of his breath a few inches away reassures you. But he rarely lets go; the need you have to be touched by him is matched by a need in him to touch you. How long does this go on? You don’t know, you can’t know, and besides, it’s the last thing on your mind—though it would suck if the bar closed before you finished. At some point you start to think he’s grown extra hands but you realize he’s sharing you with other men. Your sense of abandonment increases then. Before, you could have said you chose this man, but these other men touching you, using you, having sex with you, these men you didn’t choose, nor they you; you have been given to them like a toy. There are hands everywhere now. You are being caressed, fondled, slapped, pinched, prodded, you are being pushed to your knees, things are put in your mouth, hands move your face from crotch to crotch, your mouth on one man, your hands on two others, you are moved from one man to another and then another and you lose the man you had been with and then finally you lose yourself. You are a drill boring into the earth. You are a top spun round and round. You are an umbrella twirling off the drops that fall on it. You are a helicopter whirling into the sky. You are the world, turning on its axis. You are making so many people so happy, but what are you? You know that some people decry this kind of sex for its lack of intimate connection, but how much more connected could you be? You feel lifted and weighted by your attachment with the men touching you. If you knew one more thing about them, if you were to learn even their names, you feel you would explode with excess information. But you remain in a perfect suspended state of contained motion. It’s in these pure moments that truth comes wandering in like a hungry dog. As you feed in the midst of your frenzied pack you understand what the point of this sex is. The point of sex isn’t orgasm; what you’re doing is the point of sex. The point of sex isn’t merely self-obliteration, it’s the obliteration of the murdering world by a self made all-powerful and all-consuming. But only temporarily. Soon, inevitably, your motion ceases. As you come to rest and come back to yourself you hear men speaking around you, above you; have they been talking the whole time? You consider speaking. You’re in Amsterdam, after all, where half the residents speak English better than you do. But you don’t. Dizzy, you kneel on the floor, silent. Then a familiar pair of leather hands touches you, presses your cheek against a familiar soft flat stomach. You wonder, who really hides behind the blindfold? A sticky semihard cock lays against your neck. In a moment he stands you up. He kisses you, in farewell you think, but then you feel his hand unbuckling your belt, unbuttoning your pants, unleashing you. Only then are you stunned by what goes on in this world. Who are you, you think, whoever you are holding me now in hand? What are you? But you know. He is the only man you have had sex with tonight. He is the only man you have ever had sex with, and he is every man you have ever had sex with before. He is everyone in the world but Daniel. He is someone and something you have found once and in a moment will lose forever. But for right now, he is your soul.
6. Pain
I believe that the soul exists, but not all the time. It has to be whipped into shape, like an egg cream, like a political party, like a slave. But this calling forth of the soul is fraught, for what is whipped is not the soul but the self. The soul will only come forward when the self is effaced, and afterward, when it has departed, it is the body that must bear the pain of the beating. In your search you find yourself on my bed. I close your eyes and I seal your mouth, I fill your ears and I stuff your nose with amyl, I hide your face from you and from me. On the bed you are a naked body and on the bed you are a body without a head. You are a stranger on my bed, your face and all it signifies hidden from me and your body and all it signifies hidden from you. From now on you can only feel; from now on I can only act. Only I can act and I can only act on the shackled pink X that is your body. The black egg that your head has become retains its mysteries, and inside that egg you are trapped. The distant slapping and lashing and beating and punching are powerless blows against a shell that won’t crack, and the pain that you feel, but can’t see or hear, or cry out against, or know, or describe, is different from any pain you have ever felt before. Because your external senses have been made useless it moves inside of you, inside your body and then, inevitably, inside your mind, and soon it comes to feel like a part of you. That part of you is a wind, a tornado that lifts you from where you are—my bed, and this world, and your life—and sets you down somewhere else. Later you will be able to say nothing about this place save that whatever is there can’t be experienced through the senses, but while you are there you don’t even know you’re there. Only I know that. When you come back all you know is that you aren’t there anymore, and that you hurt. Distant points of violation identify themselves, and the pain you feel in each place is distinct from the pain in each of the other places. For a moment you slip inside each of these pains and for each of these moments you rise a few inches above the bed and are back where you had been. But then you fall, and fall again, again and again you fall until finally a knowledge that is more a yearning than an idea makes you still: you realize that it’s only in the moments after it leaves you that you know the soul in terms you can understand, in words, in remembered sensations. That’s all. That is all there is, and you know then that you can only lie here bound to the bed at your wrists and ankles but bound to the world by ties even more constraining, and you lie there, and you watch your soul retreat from you, and it retreats from you like the loss of your mother’s body.
7. Addiction
Neither the flame shall singe your fingers nor the smoke cloud your lungs. Nor the flame burn your lips, nor the smoke blacken your breath. Nor the flame melt your skin, nor the smoke rot your body. Nor the flame consume the world, nor the smoke wave its banner to the dead. Nor singe, nor burn, nor melt, nor consume; nor cloud, nor blacken, nor rot, nor wave. The only sign, this: the yellow tips of two of your fingers, the mark of habit, of compulsion, of identity, of Cain. Here is your point of departure, here your journey’s end. Here is your portable home and here the continuous you. No matter where you are you can look at these yellow tips and locate yourself. Touch them to your lips and you will remember everything you have ever done. Touch them to mine and for that instant I will know you completely.
8. Fear
Then from the horizon black like the wall of a distant cliff comes the wind, washing waves over the bow of the boat and knocking the fire from its place, and then the fire begins to devour the flesh of the boat. Then the men fight the fanned flames with buckets of water and the soil of potted plants and the breath of their lungs and then, suddenly, somehow, the fire is gone. Then for a moment the burned boat rides in the lee of a valley between two high mountains of water, and then the mountains clap together like a pair of hands and the boat is broken apart like match-sticks. Then the men cling to the splinters of their lives and fear a grave in the dark mud far below them and forget forever their voyage of discovery, and the
y call out in voices drowned by the wind, “We are doomed.” And only then does one voice shine forth like a beacon, and in unwavering tones declare, “You are saved.”
9. Grief
Coming and Going Blues
for Daniel George Marks, 1957–1988
I been blue all day
I been blue all day
I been thinking ’bout my man
He done come and gone away
He done took up sick
Sick done took up him
Sickness fell down like a storm
Weatherman said It sure looks grim
I watched it take up hold
I watched it take up hold
Wheezing like a tire hit a nail
His skin was hot but now it’s cold
Marks showed up on his face
Marks showed up on his face
They showed a map of hurt and pain
I hope he’s in a painless place
At the end I took his hand
At the end I took his hand