Anointed
By
This was the guy who quoted
Pygmalion, as if I were his diamond in the rough. And this was the guy who stood
in the driveway, a real Gatsby, and spread out his arms and said, “This is my
house,” as if I were made holy there.
But his friend (the one renting the
little house from him—the front house, the small house, the house that was once
a post office where I had collected my mail on summer mornings, the box key
shiny from the many fingers before mine, the postmaster in visor, waiting for
the guests to arrive, the sun shallow across the lake) found him five days too
late. And so he died. But I
carried his mark.
It was in this smaller of the two houses, with
bead-board walls and those plastic curtains for doors, where it happened. It
was in the house with Hank Williams on the turntable. It was in that house
where he brought me behind the curtain and said my hair reminded him of riding
in a boat before the thunder, when the static brings it all alive, forms a
halo.
Then his dry lips anointed my forehead.
It would have been around now that he went into that
other, bigger house—the back house, the veranda house, the death house—with a
bottle, a coyote denning up somewhere. Pawing the ground in a circle, waiting
for winter to end, curling around himself and looking
up at the pockmarked sky, seeing the two of us on a boat near the island where
blueberries grow and knowing how my hand would fit into his, silk on silk. And
how, with the form of his lips a stigmata upon me, his
eyes would shine down as I waited, away, far away, for sleep, gentle, gentle,
for sleep.
Copyright © 2005 Mywanwy Collins