IN THE MAGAZINE

Drawing by the Author

ABSINTHE - PART 3

By William T. Vollmann

Here is leaf-hair, new stubble in your snowy armpits. Your menstrual blood becomes the rusty evening light of courtyards, and each stone of the necklace I bought you so long ago is now the ultramarine Neva.

Upon the border of a canal’s chocolate green, the green hem of summer darkness, both reflection and shadow, irregularly superimposes itself, laced with hurrying light; this must have been how it was when we made love; and I almost want to beg you to let me adore you, but there is no pain; our days and moans are now tranquil bridges in and out of greenness.

With folded hands you sit in green shadows. Seagulls of light circle you.

Your naked legs, your legs of light, aren’t they sunnier now, like the lemon-yellow walls bleached by sugar? I see white sugar terraces shuttered and balconied; perhaps those are your legs, your thighs; and I sometimes dip the spoon in the absinthe, then pull it out of you. Together we add the sugar and light it. We wait until the pale blue flame comes, then I place the spoon back in the glass, the bell-shaped glass.

Sometimes I simply pour sugar grains into the bell-shaped glass, then turn it round and round, and light it so that all the while the sizzling sugar rings the rim of the glass; wasn’t this how it was when my tongue was on your anus?

I pour blue flame back and forth between the two bell-shaped glasses. A lump of brown sugar, bearded with bubbles and flame, sizzles in the green absinthe. The sound comforts me, like the boiling of a tea kettle in a grandmother’s house in winter.

Once upon a time I met an absinthe girl who became happy and sad and talkative; then we made love, after which she fell so fast asleep that even when I lifted her to her feet she remained a corpse. With her I tasted the green taste; but only with you did I taste the burning bittersweet taste, both hot and strong.

It is true that when she slept, I felt an overpowering love; but what does my love mean? It comes out of me like milk from the breast of a mother whose baby just died; only with you did I ever taste the bittersweet taste.

Just as the Kremlin Wall’s reddish jaw runs high above the snowbound walkways of the city, so the bell-line of the absinthe glass encloses my world of morning light on uneven summer grass, of splendidly ragged trees, beer bottles, the puffed-out chests of tree-giants. What do reflections mean? I think I see your image in the canal.

And your hair-sun, your spread fingers, they remind me when we made love in the leafy position. Amidst Russian schoolgirls with sunny plaids and shady braids, you, no younger than their mothers, are sunny, shady, leafy, grassy.

Here within the bottle, everything around us is so bright that it’s pure white sugar, but that might simply be the whiteness of your dress; perhaps I’m drowsing with my head on your lap, all the other girls shrinking into shadow, ducks swimming across the sun. Gazing up your skirt I see green lace and blue sky. No, I look up through a forest of umbrellas. Their black ribs reverse a million suns. What will happen? I want to gaze up your skirt. Where are you? I see a crowd sitting on a grassy hill. Don’t you remember me? How could you have left me?

At the bottom of summer’s bottle, rectangular grass-islands alternate with canals of white sand. A mother perambulates her sleeping baby, gazing sleepily into space. I must be in the bottle itself now; the barmaid has brought me several glasses. And the slow turn of a perambulator’s wheels reminds me how you wanted to have my baby. A sweaty skirt clings to the mother’s buttocks; deliciously she scratches her sweaty buttock.

You are a tree. Every breath makes you younger, because there is no end here, not until the end.

The remembered smell of your hair is sunny patches of sidewalk, sunny hair, sunny fingers on shady knees. I smell your skin with all the secret nostrils of tree bark. The sunny, shady reticulations of you and me in the bed have become pleasurably complicated by leaves in the sky, leaves like clusters of green grapes.

Your leaf-eyes see me without distinguishing me from others, but my sorrow sleeps beneath a blanket of liquid jade; and my desire for you is a single gilded leaf on a black trunk. In the absinthe bottle, blackish trees grow blacker by dwindling up into the light.

Now my skull has become as heavy as if it bore an entire winter’s ice. But I will not sleep. I want to lick your leaves melting into light, pools of butter-light around trees, pancake light.

And all this happens as I raise the glass for Russia’s sake, the bell-shaped glass of absinthe. Some are taught to rush it down; I have been one of those.

Copyright © by William T. Vollmann


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Comments

Anonymous, on Jun 4, 2009 wrote: sometimes. it seems as if your writers are nerds with too much creative writing college.