Leaning Into The Afternoons

She bit my lip
As if she’d been caught in the act
In the single-wide, Magnolia white trailer
With the missing window
Lined up with the rest
In rows like the houses
Where I grew up
(But not at all)

This was my town
But I was the stranger here
She moves with practiced pace
Silent not for the two at stage left
(The now familiar sounds of that Act
Barely reaching the spotlight here)
But for the sake of the other
The wife
The mother
Sleeping sound backstage; babe in arms
(The pang only now creeping back to me)

She leans and bends preoccupied
Eyeing her reflection
Pulling on her shoe
Her mirror the glass of a portrait
Hanging flimsy on the wall

I’m lying on the floor
Licking my wound
Liking my new adversary
A little amazed
A little amused
The taste of blood on my tongue
Salty. Bitter. Alive!

She knows I pretend at being a writer
And she walks towards me:
Will you write about this someday?
What will you say?
Do you like my hair this way?
Do you think we’ll kill more time this way?

There is a bruise above her left knee
Like a dark, blue rose
My first brush with irony

It’s warm enough now
Come Sunday morning
She’ll not have to cover it up
With nylon hose

~ Kitter LaGore ~

I am most likely very late to this party, but a FB friend I’ve come to respect highly suggested I like the page of an “alternative model based out of New York and southern CT” who goes by the nom de guerre Kitter LaGore. My friend offered no explanation…only the suggestion. I perused all of the available pieces of her portfolio and while she still seems to need to “own” her body as a tool of expression, she is most definitely accomplished. But one link revealed what is, to me, one of the boldest, most fearless, and contextually powerful – considering this is the Internet – statements I have come across of late. It reminded me, somehow, of the poem below…of how it was born of form in strict defiance of function. And as to Ms. LaGore’s defiant statement, I leave this link:

Colliding With Forever – Kitter LaGore

She lies as if dropped from the sky
just across the room,
sheets discarded to the waist,
eyes closed, mouth slightly open, asleep.

Sweeping curves
which cut across the surface of the bed
suggest the passage of life at high speed.
Her milky skin represents the road,
the brown the landscape,
the blue the sky.

Her dream is a tempestuous blend
of primary colors and furious brushwork.
Her eyelids are a rapid veil
through which abstract forms
derived from organic shapes such as flowers,
milkweed, and cocoons can be vaguely discerned.
I sense there is something hidden
beyond the knotted brow of the hill.

Her dreams are measured in wingspan,
powerful and graceful,
expressing the idea of soaring freedom,
yet they are also a perpetual handicap
confining her in the veering gallery space of this low-slung world.

She is an exercise in perfect but seemingly impossible balance.

The room is full of signs of human presence,
the wine glass,
the other with icewater crafting layers of condensation,
toppled shoes,
forgotten paints and canvases,
decorations instead of Modelo.
She has created this atmosphere
with focus and grace.

And so I ask myself why it is impossible not to look at her.

She is a monochrome in shades of gray,
a preliminary drawing in full size
executed entirely with a brush and usually in a wash.
And this gradual visibility of underlayers with the passage of time,
this bleeding through:
her skin is canvas,
her heart beats outstretched in gilded brocades,
her hands are filled with colors,
her blood is wet paint,
her eyes moving light,
her mouth sleepy music.

She wonders how much I pay attention,
how much I understand,
and this is the story of how I became a nightwatchman.

The bottom line is the spilled wine
The ruby lake on the table
Dripping on my knees
Like the tears of a blind man
Who newly sees

The bottom line is the familiar ache
Too real to shake
Too hard to explain
Too easy
Like a prism of colors in the rain

The bottom line is the warm blood
That seeps its way out of my cold heart
To the beat of a drum
Always carried
All the time
Always a rhythm rhyming inside
Making me a tall, awkward song

The bottom line is the sometimes welling up in the eyes
That the noisy world
All too eagerly dries
With whatever it happens to be selling
At the time

Or is the bottom line this?
Beauty and terror on a dreamed date
Moving each other close
Dancing a slow motion universe bending down sarabande
Locked staring into each other’s eyes
As if for the first
Or the last
Time

The bottom line is some unknown, unspoken word
I need another word
For that which comes out of nowhere
So good
Like a smiling child
Glimpsed in a room full of strangers
A room full of good things to eat
As if it has all been somehow prearranged:
She’s smiling at me
Even though we both know
We’ll never meet

I miss the curves
Of the slender girl
Who lied to me
With boundless joy, it seemed
Who spun some future
From gossamer thread and broken glass
A fragile thing
The shape of which came naturally
(To her, I suppose)

Beneath the drifting ship of sky
With clouds for sails
And rocky shores for rope
If all else fails, we’ll keep the lie alive
Until it’s true

Words grow stale on my tongue
Robbing the past of its flavor
For what do you hunger now?
Empty calories at best
At best

From the ashes of the flame you sparked
Gather your tassels and fly
On wings laden with fear
Into a sun setting in the east
Then color me impressed
Distantly, and with shades of grey

We wore those days
Like charms around our necks,
And dragged those nights out
In a bed of starry laughter
Now your charms they drown you
While mine are washed away
Swallowed up in limestone fields
You count the tides, I court the moon

Many dishes are best served cold
I know your kind of chivalry
May it ruin you beautifully
Some glorious conflagration
And may you rise again

You’ll not know (from me)
There’s a shred of something
Left in these shallows
Something lovely that you overlooked
And failed to kill