as only (by now it was established) we could: just the dread silence of me alone,
with my own heart. On cement, in rain, wet.
I left him on a corner. Asked him which way he was going.
98
Would have gone the opposite. Extended my hand, kind but
formal, serious and sober, ladylike and gentlemanly, quiet but
taut, firm and final. He took it and he pulled me into his lips
so hard that I would have had to make both of us fall to get
away: and I didn’t scream: and he said he loved me and would
publish my book. Oh, I said, wet.
We left the restaurant and walked down a wide street full of
shops, cards, clothes, coffeehouses, restaurants, some trees
even, brick buildings, light from the moon on the rain. We
talked nervous clips, half sentences, fatigue and coffee, wet.
We crossed a small street. We stood in front of a blooming
garden, all colored and leafy, where a prison used to be, I had
been in it, a tall brick building, twelve floors of women, locked
up, a building where they took you and spread your legs and
tried to hurt you by tearing you apart inside. A building where
they put you in cells and locked that door and then locked a
thicker door and then locked a thicker door, and you could
look out the window and see us standing on that corner below,
looking like a man and a woman kissing under the moon in
the rain, wet. You could see the lights and the hookers on the
street corners and the literati fucking around too. You could
see a Howard Johnson’s when it was still there and gaggles of
pimps right across a huge intersection and you could hear a
buzz, a hum, that sounded like music from up there, up on one
of those floors inside that brick. You could see the people
underneath, down below, and you could wonder who they
were, especially the boys and the girls kissing, you could see
everything and everyone but you couldn’t get at them, even if
you screamed, and inside they spread you on a table and they
tore you up and they left you bleeding. And they tore me up.
And now it was a garden, very pretty really, and my honey the
publisher who I had just met was right there, in the moonlight,
wet: and the blood was flowing: he grabbed me and pulled me
and kissed me hard and held me so I couldn’t move and it was
all fast and hard and he said he loved me.
*
I am bleeding again on this corner; where there was a prison;
where a man has kissed me against my will; and will publish
my book, oh my love; and it is wet; and the cement glistens;
99
and the moon lights up the rain; and I am wet. I turn away
