saw
my reflection streaked with indoor sunlight in the tall mirror,
and i took it down. i walked out to the garage with it under my
arm, it's silver glass throwing ribbons of frenzied sunlight against
the side of the house as i walked. i entered the pleasing familiar
engine-oil and sawdust odor of the garage in it's dark grey concrete
and gasoline puddle-stains, and started drilling a small hole
in the top of the wooden frame around the mirror. then i unbent
a coathanger and stuck one end through the hole, bending it into
a loose oval-shape. i walked with the mirror into the forest in
the backyard. a large patch of poison-ivy had just been removed
from the woods, and there were violent patches of dark ground
getting dry and dusty in the sun with roots sticking out of them
like torn veins with nothing to grab at. the sunlight bounced
around again, slashing at the treebark around me, and i imagined
that it was burning a wide swath through the world around me,
that i could carry my mirror through the streets and watch the
neon signs fall in sparks around me, watch the old bricks cleansed
of their dirt, watch the clothes scorched off the backs of the
people on the sidewalk, their skin tanned suddenly by the reflected
beam and their confused arms wrapping around their backs flinching
in the seductive brush of the air. i want to bring lovely chaos
to the whole world with a thing that had been previously used
only to cast back my own reflection, my reflection become so familiar
that it is now meaningless.
i find a small clearing with a maple tree
that is diseased and is not able to sprout leaves, and i hang
my mirror from it's branch, wrapping the pliable metal of the
coathanger around it, the branch quivering slightly and making
the mirror shiver as it casts it's beams, my feet bare atop the
soft and pleasantly prickling carpet of the pineneedles. now i
can see what happens to my countenance when i am away from the
rushing restaurant where i work, away from the conversations that
have ceased to discover anything new, away from the phone and
the mailbox. here i will see if my face has any purity left in
it. the mirror dangles my reflection in front of me, and i strip
off my clothes and stand in front of it. i become aroused and
masturbate until my semen hits the cool glass and slides down
it without the slightest whisper, and the forest gets slightly
louder around me, as my seed drips off the bottom of the frame
and strikes a patch of sunlight on the forest floor. a squirrel
springs through the tiny branches of pine-saplings, acorns making
his mouth comically bulge, and i laugh softly, my urethra stinging.
i think i caught an infection back in the machine world. i tear
indian cucumbers out of the ground, chomping the white and unsatisfying
roots that taste of soil and shadow and underground rivers and
wells lost in moss with broken buckets and houses fallen into
their basements in the cool agressive smell of ice melting and
letting loose the fallen leaves.
i pull my clothes back on, and now they feel
bearable since i have been without them for a while, the sweat
dried slightly and pressed against me again, the sun cooler on
them now, afternoon turning to twilight and making everything
blueberry-colored as i reach the tar of a back-road behind the
woods and realize that as i have grown the woods that used to
seem so deep have grown smaller around my body. my feet are bare
on the tar and the warmth remaining there calms me. i pick blueberries
and raspberries from the roadside, tasting car exhaust and floorboards
in the berries, staring at the roadside houses getting closer
together every year. there are many large boulders near the road
and i imagine that they are meteors, and that soon more will fall,
making the chairs tremble under the porch-chairs of the elderly
who dominate this town. i don't know if i am satisfied with what
my mirror has shown me today, though there were no newspapers
poker cards or ashtrays in the background of it, though it was
cleansed and my language made simple in the motionlessness of
my mouth.
i round a bend and one of the houses that's
close to the road casts back my reflection in it's sliding-glass
door. fire is growling there too, from a family's barbecue, and
i smile and wave at them, they waving back, their smiles a little
too dry, too stretched, but better than sneers. they cannot know
how far i am outside them, how i see the lost emotions in each
twitch of their faces. but the meat on their grill smells good
in the breeze, and i look past them toward the mountain, a mountain
that was made bald when angry farmers chased a pack of wolves
to the peak and set fire to it, the howls rising in a swarm of
roasting meat and the heat scouring the ground down to the rock,
revealing small caves smoking in daylight and creating a false
tree-line. i near a hill that descends down through thick maple
trees, the bright green bathed in the remainder of sunlight, the
semen running down the mirror, the green darkness settling on
the tar, the skin green in reflection, the boulders rumbling and
getting ready to roll, flattening the town just before sunset.
they make their houses of stone now, to avoid the impact of meteorites.
i laugh for reasons unexpressed.
i am nearing our driveway with the feeling
that the silver mirage ahead of me on the highway is about to
unfold into something. i draw close to the mirage and see a glimpse
of wood that becomes a guitar, an acoustic guitar with a broken
neck, it's strings hanging on. there is blood around the guitar,
blood mixed with slight touches of gasoline, and i peer into the
puddles, something in their reflection catching my eyes--there
is a skyscraper blotting out the sun, a skyscraper that isn't
there because this is the country. a beautiful girl with red hair
comes out of it's window, her features a blob of shifting water,
the tides are in her face, surging and then receding, and suddenly
eyes take shape, staring peacefully at me in the tremble of the
puddle, the rainbow gloss of gasoline shimmering on the blood.
the sight of her red hair against the gray of skyscraper stone
gives me shiver as if i just swallowed a double-shot of vodka,
as if the shard of city in the puddle will swallow me, and i will
be taken from my reflection, my mirror covered with lichens in
the wood left behind, her bedroom smelling like the leaves of
a dry plant in a dried lava-pocket of a numbered room at the peak
of a city, swelling toward the sky, the pens of the dead architects
behind us as the city waits for an explosion. i turn toward the
sand of our driveway, virgin and surrounded by trees and small
wooden houses painted a calmer shade of red, and the strings of
the guitar snap and spring loose into the breeze, twanging and
unplayable. i open the mailbox at the foot of the driveway and
a letter is sucked backward into it, the name fading into shadow
and then the paper burning in a rose-shape. i have not met the
city and i have not fallen in love. the blueberries fade on my
teeth, and i see flashes of concrete, flashes of legs crisscrossing
each other in fishnet stockings, immense glass throwing them back
at themselves on every side. purity. purity. purity can live anywhere.
[END]
© Luke Buckham 2002
