15 Minutes Past Sagittarius

The image of your candle flame is burned into my mind. I still see it flickering on your forehead like a third eye looking back at me. Even behind closed lids I see it, feel your gaze.

I should get up soon, go to the sewing kit and stitch my costume for the day. The basket lies open near the bed – some dusty spools are mine, but many more are yours. The ghost of the flame still lingers, fitting the shape of a needle’s eye. I stare through it, knowing it to be a portal through which time will resume as soon as a thread is chosen and is passed through. Just a moment for my pulse to slow to the rhythm of your breath, those deliberate waves that draw me deeper into the blankets.

Cruel, cold floor – the slightest touch of my foot against it would connect me with this house, the entire estate, and some role it demands I play. A map of our villa is in a drawer somewhere in the room – a tailor’s pattern, a blueprint, an unfinished dream. I recall sketching lines on the parchment, but now it seems much of the handwriting is yours. You’ve made everything new, novel, perennially under construction. And yet under the blankets, where you turn to nuzzle your back into me, all seems timeless and familiar. On paper, in sunlight, every line was straight and square, correct. Too correct. Now, under moonlit shadows, the geometry is organic, conforming to each of your curves.

My thoughts have disturbed a ball of yarn in the basket. It tumbles out, and the kitten gives chase. I don’t recall your having a cat, but there she is, the mighty hunter toying with her prey. Her forehead is branded with the candle flame in my mind, like an Egyptian hieroglyph of the All-Seeing Eye. The kitty is even more Eastern than that – Siamese, I should think, judging from the turquoise and emerald of her eyes, matching the satins and sequins that wrap my love.

The fuzzy ball escapes through the balcony door. The cat pursues, after glancing back to confirm my attention hasn’t drifted. But I’m not anxious to fling open the blankets and release nocturnal warmth. I can follow her, anyway, in the theater of my mind.

Pussy is in my studio, where I spent so many years sculpting my hopes of you, my fingers penetrating deep in moist clay, my nostrils filled with the scent of earth. My hands delighted in anticipating your shape. Busts fill the shelves, statues line the walls – the stove eyes still glow atop the oven where I baked my models. Every one came short of you, though, draining of life as it dried. It must be the eyes. I sculpted a hollow in each to catch a shadow – it works, but only if I stand a little distance away. What’s that about cakes – why can’t I hold my love and look at her, too? My ceramic faces look through me to you, and crack, disenchanted now with their artist.

Feline fur whispers through the door. She’s become larger, a lynx. Though she doesn’t turn to demand I follow, it’s no accident that her tail is flipped so high. She’s in the gardens. The estate is studded with them – the baroque, the labyrinth, the orchard – and I’ve strolled through every one, though they seem to shift about and are impossible to embroider on my map. The bouncing ball has disappeared, lost. Or has it multiplied, become the fruit dangling in the branches like your delicious ideas? The lynx poses beneath the trees, waiting for me to choose one and give it a toss. The puzzle is to pick which citrus is yours and which mine, but I know the trick, and sniff for that with the sweetest, juiciest breath.

I’ve won the game but disturbed birds roosting in the trees where the fruit had been – they flutter out in a blaze of Amazon colors, the lynx watching with more than interest. I could swear she said, “Aye, sir, I’ll try you in the labyrinth next,” and she pulls my arm round her shoulder to carry me there.

The flickering wings settle as torches to light lush halls of tall hedges that are decidedly yours. A flame meets my eye wherever I turn, and lures my hand irresistibly to pierce inside. Its soul feels as wet on my skin as it does warm.

The lynx prowls on, but I stop before each corridor to listen. The wind rustles twigs into the clacking of a million little spider legs knitting their webs, and if the way is blocked somewhere around a bend the breeze is trapped, and resonates with whistles and hums of things you shouldn’t have to tell me, that I should just know. I’ve learned to avoid such paths, and choose instead the quiet ways, those you’ve forgotten were open or don’t know so well, even if all these halls are yours. The passages house thieving bunnies which take caution against the lynx, and sometimes darker, grumbling shadows and stains. Well, a few little beasties haunt my own caverns, too, and it’s best not to pester such creatures, to trust another day’s sunlight to burn them away.

So I escape your labyrinth, though leaving groomed green paths for dark jungle seems more going deeper than emerging. The torches spark and disperse as prisms woven into a veil of mist, shimmering in vines that smell of my angel’s hair. Having grown to respect my triumphs in her tests, the cat has matured more potent, a jungle feline, though before I can tell what kind she disappears with two graceful bounds into the bush, a fading shadow daring me to find her. I do still sense her behind the chaos of birdcalls, screaming insects, and alien cries that fill the forest; she’s there as surely as the sun is somewhere beyond the fog.

I choose the one constant – the song of a river threading through mangrove roots. Its chorus gradually increases to a crescendo at the base of a waterfall. A thousand eyes push me up its channeling rocks, the cascade washing my back so clear that my heart is revealed, throbbing like a red sun. Easily I claw to the summit – our balcony overlooking the rainforest – and notice your kitten-paw slippers beside the bed. Somewhere under the mound of blankets is the spring, the source of all that moisture.

The sewing kit still lies open. I squint through the needle’s eye, deciding which uniform, what version of me best says to you, “It is I.” But animal magic begins to reveal the moon whole under the shadow of its crescent, and my lids open full. I find your eye peeking over the pillow, flickering the scantily coded message, “Need you get dressed just yet? The candle is still lit.”

A dove should be nesting at this late hour, but there she is, flitting about as if crazed by the full moon. Like a moth drawn to a candle, she tries to reach the silvery orb, only to drop exhausted from the sky – the reflection is farther away than it appears. Again and again she falls from light into shadow, till I see her no more.

I’ve lifted my own dove in this very same glow, produced by blue gels over stage lights, when dancing a pas de deux with Lacy, my ballerina of many seasons. But that was in the past – I’m on duty now, in the back parking lot of a church in urban Atlanta.

The police are tidying up their report just a few blocks away. Next of kin known, but disinterested – the little crack-whore is destined for the paupers’ cemetery which runs downhill from the prison, just above the landfill. Her drama will soon be covered over by the light of the moon. I think of it as a hunters’ moon – I avoid claiming that it actually contributes to lunacy with the pragmatic observation that the bad guys can simply see their targets better. It’s just risen above a branch of that oak against the fence, as if the tree were raising a lantern to reveal the world for which I am responsible.

I seek to recover strength behind Israel Baptist Church, sitting in the cruiser assigned to me as EMS lieutenant for the southern half of the county. The child around the corner is dead, beyond recovery. As I approached, the cop had lifted pencil from clipboard just enough to indicate the door to a toolshed – a sure sign that his most pressing concern was to avoid contaminating a crime scene. The moonlight that could penetrate the one greasy window took a moment before revealing a little black girl collapsed over her knees like a Muslim at prayer, her forehead to the concrete. I had no real hope that the dark pool running from beneath her to the floor drain might be oil. Her skin was the temperature of the night, and my fingers discovered only the wound in her neck – the heartbeat had gone out with her blood, it had been a while since her last sigh.

I wanted to do more for her – at least give her the dignity of pulling her pants up from around her knees. But once death is confirmed it is indeed a crime scene. The medical emergency is over – just cancel the ambulance and fire crews who are en route, and disturb nothing for fear of cheating CSI technicians of their booty. I’ve no more duty to her – only to the file cabinet, providing a medical report to supplement the police documentation. The cop knew her name, having picked her up a few times as a child out too late and loitering at the wrong corner.

The church parking lot is empty, save for me. A few hours earlier it had been filled. They call it choir practice, but at an urban gospel church on a Saturday night surely throats were filled with the same passion and joy as will be shared with the congregation in the morning. Worship that waxes and wanes as does the moon – their song will rise again with the sun. It’s a hot night, but the cool blue of the moonlight makes everything in this world gleam as if from a light within, a landscape under a summer snow.

The peace belies the neighborhood. Somewhere in the shadows nearby is the monster who thought her life worth less than the coins she’d asked for her service. I don’t know that devil, though it’s easy to recognize others – I can diagnose a patient’s drug of choice by the personality of the demon who’s taken him over. There’s a corner suckling at liquor, a whole block loiters with marijuana and hashish, but the nearest intersection is the haunt of crack cocaine, her pushers and her whores.

The girl was fourteen. Her skin had become ashen upon releasing her dove, no moisture left in her body to give it a sheen. Her voice is silenced forever, her dove flung into darkness, with only my prayers to lift her to the light. Maybe that’s why I think of Lacy – she was about this age when I first danced with her.

My virginal Lacy – she danced the Snow Pas de Deux clad all in white and glowing in the stage lights. I appeared in white, too, when I danced with her, my partnering an act of worship of Beauty become corporeal. During this dance our legs grew cold from the dry ice machine rolling a heavy fog over the stage – I can imagine how that felt to the snowflake dancers when they finally found order, forming two columns and bowing deep into the mist. Approaching the final crescendo, I carried Lacy overhead in promenade between them, and paused at center stage. I could feel her leg stretch just a bit higher above me in arabesque, even feel her wrists pulse the last waves of music before the curtain. Nothing so lovely could be real, but there she was, living, perched on my hand as if I’d plucked her from the heavens to present her almost within reach of the first row. As the music receded I could hear the audience draw in the vision with their breath.

Movement in the shadows under the tree catches my eye, but it’s only a breeze stirring dead leaves. Where in the debris has that dove fallen? I would brush away the ashes of the world into which this little spirit was born and, like that oak lifting the moon above the shadows, present her to the heavens, asking God to receive back this child. I can’t save them all – I know that. The choir must rest its voice in the stillness before sunrise, but I search for the prayer that could find the lost dove. No words come – what rises from my heart is a vision of Lacy circling cautiously till she takes my hand, and trusts me to lift her into the lights. I have touched Beauty. I am ready for the next call.