Something about rhyming
Sex, hex, treks, wrecks, flex. Lips, hips, ships, blips, sips, dips, rips. Clit, slit, flit. Flower, power, bower. Her glasses were a preoccupation. Moon, June, loon, spoon. Try as she may, rhymes injected themselves in her thoughts. She could imagine the hotels where they fucked, the cities they walked around, dapper and then sinister, and retrospect did him no favors.
They say a poet should have a model to study, imitate, absorb, get over, transcend. It struck her as odd. Getting over was surely heartache and transcendence happened to others, it was rumored, or was long gone.
Novels were an exception, something to carve up or excise, bring forward and reconnect, saying the words aloud slowly or hesitatingly, a voice rising and falling unrealistically as the gaps between them threw her. Or she wrote letters as she imagined a poet writing letters, sighing as life marches past or joking about her quirks and invoking a lover on a staircase and a still half-open door at the top. It bordered on stories, but they were letters and not a little romantic, like the families in War & Peace, divided so she didn’t need a scorecard. She couldn’t see how he wrote such an epic, all of Moscow jammed into it plus French regiments. She pictured how it could be mined for words, but would they rhyme? His rhymes were less obvious.
Sometimes they went to look at the sea. Wave, stave, rave, brave. “Fave,” she added. “Fave makes five,” as indeed it did. The sea fell upon rocks and there wasn’t really a beach. Elsewhere, yes, but she wasn’t much of a beach girl, more an onlooker where the sea fell upon rocks. (Socks, locks or lox, pox, docks.) She pushed her glasses back against the bridge of her nose, stared at the text, then set it down. She thought of her new friend, who arrived wearing a stunning thing borrowed from her mother, she said. Whose is this closet of wonders, she wondered? Even if she knew the answer, she could only infer the closet’s keeper from the clothes she passed along. This particular morning, her friend wore a colored blouse, almost Madras but not. She meanwhile wore what she wore, but felt that poets had no need for elegance in this sense, only the rhymes, words brought out of the darkness.
Beach, leech, teach, reach, screech. Blouse, louse, house, douse, spouse. Shouldn’t they marry? A mother’s question, like earlier ones about traipsing from one hotel room to another and the gap that time diminished, but not her queasiness. Queasy, easy, breezy, sleazy. It felt like a passageway too narrow and insinuating, the sounds, though muffled, an undertow. This was not necessarily accurate, she thought to herself, never being entirely sure despite her retrospective sense of dread.
Replicants. How would you know? It seemed like she’d know, but could she be sure? They were subject to time, so if he’d been one, he’d be older now. It would explain for example his depressive or fatalistic nonchalance. Fate, late, spate, crate, mate. But nothing came of it except the damage.
Who’d choose such a life, or fabricate it? Only a mother could love, and that involved no chemistry or sleight of hand. Well, enough of that or enough of him, the sea coming back to mind with its rocks and seals. Each time, she left a bit of him there, like the stubs of cigarettes that marked where the beach met the parking lot. It was like this, she felt, it would be like this, a trace that spoke of our tendency for order in the midst of transience or its edge conditions. There and gone. Who’d choose such a life?
