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A Collaboration with Margaret B Simon

Published 'Palace Corbie' (1995) and 'The Best of Palace Corbie' (1999)

I returned to what I called home, once--this terminal town of clattering trains interspersed with tiny communities last spring when I knew the dogwoods would be exploding like cotton balls amidst the green and the "Saved and Safe" smugly secure in their own implacable manner, strolling about on a Saturday to their yard sales, gossiping anon about me, no doubt. Speculating...

And, to be sure it was just as I remembered--and perhaps yet another reason I had left in the first place. So I brought a bottle of cabernet and took a local motel and waited for the scenes to shift--just to be sure, that is, if that would happen as well. It was twenty years ago, and sometimes you don't trust your memory, you see. Misfit that I was, the scholar-poet, dubbed a Nerd, estranged.

I'd brought her book with me. Unpacked this, and only this at first. Set it on the table beside my bed. Switched on the light, for the skies were dimming beyond the greenshowers of the oaks and maple. That was the only thing I liked, and now this is going down tonight. Tomorrow I didn't plan to stay. But as for Janny's book--the only one she ever published--I'd brought it back with me, just as she said I would, someday.

Of course, why not? I stood watching the reflections from the highway beyond the motel as I sipped the wine seeing my own face in the mackled glass window. Jarred by the sparkle of passing headlights I opened the door to inhale the scent of moonbeams on roses, the vintages of the season timeless--as if her face below me in our passion, haunting me with that cat-perception angst--

I remember going back, glass in hand, to leaf through her spiraled book again. On this night, the pages reeked--a sudden and terrible smell that I'd never noticed previously. Furthermore, each leaf clung, as if adhering to my clean fingers, and every time I would wet my finger, it glued to the page previous (or so it seemed, at the time). My GOD, what she had managed to do to us in so short a springtime and did she command the sun to blind me or was it that part about the skeleton that attracted me most? I limped back to bed. It had been so long to have another go. Femur, bone and marrow lost, like the membranes of a loved one's hold and a heart that has no reflections ...I became lost in the cryptic present, rubbing the stub of my left foot, meditating as if it was possible to make sense of the mental ichor so neatly typed and never typeset--she had warned me to be careful, yet



She tapped my marrow milk
With her silken mouth
Except it came out as creamy blood
She built my bones with human clay
She carved my teeth from volcanic rock
But I loved her for her flesh.
She stole my foot with exquisite ease
And took it to the last cobbler alive
For him to mould a shoe.
The horn's last rite...



I was interrupted by Janny not being in her book. The window's mirror told me I wept milky tears--for she'd never been there. The hospital has told me that losing a foot was akin to losing a child and I would suffer ...mentally ...till it was returned to me. A foundling. A lostling. It didn't matter as long as the child returned on single footsteps to its father.

The fact that I was home didn't help. Simply because I had walked here as a child didn't entail prints for me to follow ...until they were indeed shaped slots in loam leading to the track ...that line between scrawny cuttings.

Today, I hop from one to the other, knowing that Janny will never allow herself to be caught that way--a maiden tied to the rails and sleepers by a mustachioed brigand. For if she is, you won't find me untying her. A skeleton's all bones, anyway, that need scattering. The pages were stuck with the last ration of blood glue, so there you are. And here I am, limp skipping.

Such was my line of thinking that first evening, which I remember quite clearly, as if it wasn't two months ago after all. Ah, yes "The horn's last rite"--was what interrupted my sardonic contemplation on that surreal occasion. The sudden buzzing of the telephone jarred me back to reality. I hobbled to catch it, aware of my childish need to retrace steps into the past, while rebuking myself for fear of--what? Unknown phantoms?

It was ]anny's voice--a bare whisper in my ear, "I will get you out," she said, "tonight, you must come to the burial grounds and bring a shovel. Eight sharp. Ashes to ashes ...I love you." I started to respond but she cut me . off "This is a recording." and disconnected.

I sat there on the bed, quite stunned. I could feel the toes of my phantom foot stretching, could detect the aggravation of another ingrown toenail. "Janny used to dig them out for me," I said aloud, remembering how that on that last night when my foot was bothering me, she took a clean knife and clippers out, came bare to the waist to kneel and at my feet to inspect the objecting toe. I was transfixed by her tumble-jumble of sienna locks, her mock-pout crimsoned lips, tips of teasing nipples half hidden by her face and tresses, the perfumed hint of musk always present in her nearness even though we'd just made love. So there I sat, while she examined and kissed each swollen frog-belly white toe, from large to small (lingering longest over - the one I'd broken long ago--deformed and horrible to view). And finally she smiled, tossing her curls back from her forehead with that way she has and kissed her finger, touched my mouth.

I hardly felt it. Neither her kiss nor the other thing she did, not right away.

"Bring a novel," did she say? "Eight sharp."

Ten sharp, with the thumb toes, no doubt. The way I dug each one into her body was something that delighted us both ...as if hurt and love entwined She sucked her own juices off my right big toe.

Then, the novel. The book. The one I brought to keep the spiral notebook company. Where had I put it? After all, it was already seven o'clock. Only an hour to go. Yep, here it was. Under the Gideon Bible. A hardback book from the time when Boots the Chemist issued you with library tickets as well as phials of cure-all medicine. Foxed out and thumbprinted, with a strange label centuries wouldn't unstick. A squashed insect halfway down page 102. And its smell, as I breathed deeply between the crevices of pages 70-71 — was as sweet, yet as salty, as yolky blood. Many book-lovers maintain that an intrinsic feature of a tome's aesthetic is the manner its 'nose' can remind one of better days, endless summer holidays, the wonder of childhood, bee-buzzing meadows, the nuances of nostalgia or the cloying of chintz. A cross between mustiness and turmeric. Cough linctus. Newness and oldness bound together. Permutations of redolence. Speech-masks and spokesmoke. Thick thick dandelion wine. Or liquid bees. Earwax. Even toes and ankle grease. Footnotes.

I wrenched my mind back from plebeian maundering. Showered, shaved. The mirror's reflection piercing cold, eye to eye--was this my face? A new line beside my mouth indented, curving as a newel post. Hadn't noticed this before.

Checked my watch en route to the cemetery. Still close enough. I shut off the engine and coasted into a parking area. A haze covered the red moon, lighting up the graveyard, streaks of miser's milk. As if transfixed, I followed the cement walkways until I found the grave. My grave. Or rather, a part of me--the headstone of the footstone. And Janny, perfect Janny, draped with scarves and fly-away strands of midnight hair. She spoke in profile.

"Hello, James. You're a bit late, darling." The mellow tones of her voice invaded my senses. I was again at her mercy.

"Janny!--dear, dear Janny, I-"

"Did you bring the novel, James?"

"What if I didn't?" I laughed. "What would you do to me now? Bite off my nose? Render me unable to smell the wonder of your secretions, not to mention the simplest joys of ruffling through this--" and I handed her the novel.

She took it in one hand as I bent to assist her to her feet, but she refused. There was a shadow beneath her scarf, denying me access to view of her face--that marvelous face, so fluent in character and mood--and then the night wind plucked away the veils. Stricken, I saw the stump of her other hand, making an attempt to push the scarf back into place.

"There were others?" I asked, searching for some solace in her eyes.

"James ...it's really too late." She turned to face me, brushing back her scarf.

Where once there were nostrils, now only one single hole. A hole large enough for a toe, a tool, a few fingers to penetrate...

"James," she interrupted my thoughts. "James, I can't smell, but I can taste..." and she parted her lips, flicking her tongue slowly, then faster and faster until I clutched her to my own lips, unzipping myself in frenzied response and we coupled there by the gravestone of my foot until we slept, head to head. At dawn, I awoke. It seemed proper to cover her naked buxoms with the novel, and this I did before I left.
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