Odalisque
She drifts further, her land slips away into deepening mists as the room lights up all around me now and the Persian woman takes her place among the piles of red cushions. She wears a tight fitting silk pullover with a seated Buddha motif: it is highly stylized with flowers that rise around him in playful flames and he is stretched out, fattened by her welling breasts. She wears the ballooning black pants of an odalisque, and slippers with red silk ties … ah, she is so beautiful today! When she introduced herself the wet black eyes blazed with sex. There was a greeting in the Mystery. She would not release my hand, which grew heavy, and we were in a place I’ve never seen. It was her veiled desert kingdom, so very different from the islands of Vesta. My brother was there and I saw us playing in the lotus pool when we were children. As we wrestled I looked into the water and saw her lying naked on her couch and I hid my eyes, just as I would hide them now if I could only I can’t stop looking at her. I mustn’t look at her so much for her husband is seated in a chair nearby and seems to keep watch. I make sure to greet him warmly, and I always glance at him first before I let my eyes caress her cheek and her long neck and feather over her breasts until the nipples rise and I imagine kissing her strange wide mouth, her soft, yielding lips, they yield to mine like some unknown and delightful fruit and her perfume blooms and envelops me, the spires and minarets rise against the flat blue sky which is thick and palpable and filled with her breath and I kiss her, I kiss her, I can’t stop …
Someone is coming. The hall echoes with huge clacks of jackboots and I think of horses. One of the older sections of Paris with cobblestone streets. The room is dark and I hear her breathing, snoring even. It is the middle of the night and I can’t sleep. Who are you, Odalisque? Shall I simply call you that and let you be a harem girl vaulting like a gazelle over the silk piles and wine colored cushions, all around you billowing silk banners of unthinkable colors and filled with the breath of the desert, your breath, yours while I embrace you, Odalisque? The mad kings drove you from your land. You hid out in old Paris and became a courtesan. The hot Tartar moments, the greased men fighting in lotus pools. When you’d had enough you fled to America. Liberty raises her torch out of the fog and the buildings spring up and up from nothing, into nothing. There are men. Offers. Work. Soon you are covered in the drabness of industry, black, waisted blazers and gray slacks which still cannot disguise your voluptuousness, and yet you seem to wear a veil which discourages even the mildest intimacy. The vast land rolls beneath you under clouds. San Francisco, the white city. You have your children with you now. It surprises you that they should be so pale. Neither your husband, who died in the war, nor you nor any of your ancestry, certainly none of Jamal’s people, were so pale. Surely it is this vampire land, sucking up the blood of the desert and licking off the dark outer layers of their skin. They will grow up to be strutting fools, actors like all the rest. You watch them move away from you by the day, move into the dazzle, the flush and shuffle and the death rattle. They climb into elevators never to return. They carry the shoes of gangsters.
And now, years later. Behind you a deepening sky which would seem to have been given dimension by your own sorrow. And yet you are content now. Your children have returned from their adventures in the unreasoning glass reaches to bring gifts, gifts. Your new husband has command of row upon row of cubicles, of machines that talk in the night. Once grand and handsome, now he must call trainers in to show him how to hold himself, to walk and run and think the right thoughts. There is money, though, and the promise of love across the room. An impossible new land, a dream, marriage which must conduct itself in flash frames of kisses and touch, desperate entry and consummation in a ferocious shadow play recorded in time lapse. Ah. Ah. Touch me!
Someone is coming. The hall echoes with huge clacks of jackboots and I think of horses. One of the older sections of Paris with cobblestone streets. The room is dark and I hear her breathing, snoring even. It is the middle of the night and I can’t sleep. Who are you, Odalisque? Shall I simply call you that and let you be a harem girl vaulting like a gazelle over the silk piles and wine colored cushions, all around you billowing silk banners of unthinkable colors and filled with the breath of the desert, your breath, yours while I embrace you, Odalisque? The mad kings drove you from your land. You hid out in old Paris and became a courtesan. The hot Tartar moments, the greased men fighting in lotus pools. When you’d had enough you fled to America. Liberty raises her torch out of the fog and the buildings spring up and up from nothing, into nothing. There are men. Offers. Work. Soon you are covered in the drabness of industry, black, waisted blazers and gray slacks which still cannot disguise your voluptuousness, and yet you seem to wear a veil which discourages even the mildest intimacy. The vast land rolls beneath you under clouds. San Francisco, the white city. You have your children with you now. It surprises you that they should be so pale. Neither your husband, who died in the war, nor you nor any of your ancestry, certainly none of Jamal’s people, were so pale. Surely it is this vampire land, sucking up the blood of the desert and licking off the dark outer layers of their skin. They will grow up to be strutting fools, actors like all the rest. You watch them move away from you by the day, move into the dazzle, the flush and shuffle and the death rattle. They climb into elevators never to return. They carry the shoes of gangsters.
And now, years later. Behind you a deepening sky which would seem to have been given dimension by your own sorrow. And yet you are content now. Your children have returned from their adventures in the unreasoning glass reaches to bring gifts, gifts. Your new husband has command of row upon row of cubicles, of machines that talk in the night. Once grand and handsome, now he must call trainers in to show him how to hold himself, to walk and run and think the right thoughts. There is money, though, and the promise of love across the room. An impossible new land, a dream, marriage which must conduct itself in flash frames of kisses and touch, desperate entry and consummation in a ferocious shadow play recorded in time lapse. Ah. Ah. Touch me!
posted by Brent Powers at 8:43 AM
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