Friday, February 04, 2011

That Summer

1.

Her feet were blotched red, as if covered with blisters, standing on the blazing tiles of a hot courtyard, in July, under a blazing sun, her barefeet had survived the ardour of her passion, as she had stood barefoot, calling him from the courtyard of their immigrant passion. He had seen his hands covered with the after scent of crushed roses, all perfume was his. The steel of agitated hooves and the clamour of other lives could not drown the lucky star of his lucky heart. Love begins with claiming the lovers' feet first, he told her, as he looked at the sky's azure and her brown hair. Thoughts like currents passed from one to the other as they felt as one, without need for caress or touch.

2.

She looked at him through the shutters in her window, across the courtyard where he was pretending to sleep, through the shutters she pretended she had shut tight, at him across the courtyard, the concrete tiles of the courtyard baking in the hot sun, a July sun after a June of bliss, all their prayers having been answered, some by his unsure Gods, some by her mother of God, and now this. She licked her dry lips again and again, he only saw the eyes, he never saw the lips, murder at noon. A fly buzzed near his ears tirelessly which he tried to catch in his hand, when he realised that she had seen him, through the shutters. She smiled as she shut the shutters loudly, he leant back in careless bliss. The scent of violets and regrets swam through the courtyard.

3.

Her flaming lemon top burnt in the hot July sun, yet her forehead was clean, without a drop of sweat, as they looked at the glittering concrete of the car park, three steps away from closure and oblivion. He looked away from the faraway look her eyes would surely seize soon, both waiting for some incident or accident, praying to the moody godheads of sudden destruction. A rhythm and blue number, equally detested by both, played on a nearby radio, as some stray memory of her from earlier times, which he had then resolved to forget completely, struck him like a stone dropping in a silent well. The sun kept blazing though he felt suddenly so cold.

2 comments:

Roxana said...

i love this too, so much:
The scent of violets and regrets swam through the courtyard.

here are some lines from a poem, perhaps you will like it, there is something similar in the sad longing and hunger of the loving one, i find, oh and how the violets become daisies when they finally touch the skin of the beloved...


"I touch your skin, your body, and the tips of my fingers, which always used to follow yours, sense in the darkness that we are descending. They have destroyed all the bridges and the cordilleras are sinking, the Pacific is sinking, and its remains are sinking in front of us as the remains of our heart also sink. In the face of death someone said something to us about resurrection. Does that mean your empty eye sockets will see? That my fingertips will go on touching yours? My fingers touch your fingers in the darkness and go down as now the peaks, the seas, go down, as our dead love, our dead gaze, these dead words go down. Like a field of daisies that bend I touch your skin, your body, and my hands try to find in the darkness the skin of snow in which we may perhaps live again. But no, of the peaks of the Andes only the traces of these words remain, of these dead pages, of a wide, dead field of flowers where the cordilleras like white shrouds, with us beneath them and still embracing, are sinking down."


Raul Zurita
(from the Descent)

Kubla Khan said...

That is an excellent poem, thanks for sharing it and yes, I really like it.