Page From The World’s Longest Open Love Letter:
a Dangerous and Poetic Love Story
“I’ll cast aside my shame, proclaim your crime. If that be possible for me, I’ll tell my tale where many people crowd.” – Philomela to Tereus in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (trans. Rolfe Humphries, 1955, pp. 146-48)
Stucco
I will paint my rooms the color of the Los Angeles hills, thrash a wide brush forth and back over ghosts of dark gorges and plaster river banks: tributaries’ floody transit settled quietly into the walls.
First, water and white French dust are mixed to precise viscosity, quickly lifted in mountain excess, deftly placed and partly removed, mending, carefully matching someone else’s insouciance. With portions of gypsum, sand and hair I create a kind of bone. Work it as if I prepare Eve to be placed back into Adam as a rib.
I sit in a large chair the consistency of my fat granny’s lap to await evaporation. Wait, still as a cup on a shelf down-turned against infusions of particles, keen to experience each moment of changing pallor: gray and damp to white and dry.
In a day, it is done. The muscles of my back and legs ache from immobility. Stretched, they protest.
I press ever less rough paper in circles, moving to even the landscape, blending new edge to old surface. No one should ever guess.
When the walls of my room are the color of the hills, the difference between out and in will be indistinguishable, as in the recurring dream wherein the breezes’ bristles cover my body with your more pale color, as gently as two abdomens’ concentric rise and fall.
