In the mirror plane she builds a face to wear, a face to face the day. Strength returns with every brush and every stroke. She is make-believe, the pantry-woman with her tied back secrets, her dreams secured against the daylight, still throbbing with the pain of night, still raw like the tender meat they were, but drained veal-white in the hastening day.
In the mirror-plane, she glances left, then right to where in the darkened bed-corner rises Dovey. As if he’d not been lost, he unwraps his mystery as she supposed it. He comes, his love rising like his smooth tattooed chest, his belly not yet middle-aged, his loins unlocked of secrets and his thighs and calves, shining sealegs. He crosses the room as, like a ghost, he might, as insubstantial as the wisping dream about her eyes. His nakedness is a winding sheet of flesh, his flesh a veil, his pulse and blood and sinewy arms, a sketch she made from hope and wrapped his memory in.
In the mirror-plane, reflective, Dovey asks,
What now my love? What else is made of dream, but steam, but breath upon the air as I am to you? I am the creak inside your bedspring, the mattress bending underneath the sleep you cannot find. I am yours to do with as you must. But even I must sleep. The ghost you’ve made me. Even I must…He shimmers in the dust-mote sun, its shafts across the dark. She glances shyly at his face but through the mirror, not turning round. ‘Oh, Dovey,’ comes her husk of voice, the sleepy maiden in a tone of aftermath. She remembers all the grappling in the dark and the sheets wound about like seafloor kelp and all the waving fronds of love she gave him in the night.
He is tired. Even ghosts wear out after years of living on where life should fade. He cannot even know if ghost he is or just a phantom of a fugitive, too long forgotten but for Bethany Binion and her resurrecting love.
She says,
Dovey, go back to bed. Wait for me there. Wait until the sun goes round the earth, till evening comes, and night. Then we can put to sea again.’He, if a ghost can breathe, breathes out. His own mist an exhalation. His sad fog disperses, gathers by the rumpled bed. Like pipe-smoke on the inward lung, it sucks him in, grey and shabby after all.
Slugabed Binion lights one up, a pink Sobranie, her flame of Eros. She savours the mild and edgeless smoke, crosses leg to leg, silken night attire slides across like living drapes. Daytime is crusting round her as the last of night escapes with every puff. She cups an elbow with her free hand, lips a smoke, pouts it out. She lets the night disperse, paints a blush upon her cheek, waiting for the film her life should be to start.
© BH, 2014-2019
Another fragment of a longer work (-in-progress). You might get it from the sound of it or its rhythm. It's context might even give it away.
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