corey mesler : “how I love her”

 

I knew of no way to get to her, no secret passage to her heart of hearts. She is what she always was, my enigma. Earlier, yes, I remember, she was warm like the blood of youth. Yet, even then, there was something walled-off within her, something she did not show me, did not, really, show the world. And, I beat my head against that wall, God knows. Her indifference. That is what I grew to call it, as if in the name she was not only defined but somehow captured. I wanted to capture her. Did I talk to her, you ask, about her indifference? Did I make it clear that it was somehow a barrier to a deeper knowledge of each other? I tried, I did. She was kind, very kind. She would place a comforting hand on my forearm and look at me with eyes wet with compassion. She would call me her martyr. I did not know quite what that meant. As the weeks went on, and our ardor certainly increased in the bedroom, the space behind her eyes grew wider, more expansive, as if opening out into a not inconsiderable blank arena, or a public space so empty that human involvement did not figure into its history, its future. Even as she grew to know my body and what made me wild with passion she retreated. Can you understand this? Yet, I loved her. I loved her then and I love her now. She is my challenge—no, a better word is needed here. She is to me what the maze was to Icarus. You ask then: do I reach for the sun? Do I want indeed to escape, to fly away? I do not. Nights when she and I are alone, when the house is as still as a heart that beats no more, there is between us something I can’t yet define. It is a sweetness, yes, but it has to it a tang like a sour aftertaste. Perhaps a sour fore-taste, if that makes sense. Her indifference, I say to myself sometimes. Is it still there? Is that the spell we are living under? I don’t know. We are under a spell. She says, I love you, as readily as any lover. She is kind, sweet to me. When I am sick she is a wonderful nurse. When I am sad she can awaken me with a little dance, or a snatch of song, one of the old songs, when we sang together. Still, you say, there is something missing. And I answer, there is always something missing. There is always a breach, a crack. Do you really believe it is a flaw, perhaps a fatal flaw? I say to you, she is all that I have ever wanted. Even now, she waits there at the end of every day, a complex geometry. And I say to her, Lover. I whisper to her, Lover, come with me now. Let’s finally do what we were born to do, what our coming together signifies. Let’s walk out into the future, a bit stronger for being together. And she smiles the way I have seen her smile these many years, and her eyes say that she is mine, and yet deep within her, I sense it, there is that tiny black fortification, the one I have learned to live with, and the one, finally, that will defeat me, that will come just shy of destroying me, and I will be ash, just more ash. I hold out my hand now. I am as happy as a ghost. I am light, light as a rustling foot on last year’s graves.

 

Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals & anthologies. His novel, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue, was released in 2002.  His second novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, came out in January 2006. He has also published numerous chapbooks.  He has been nominated for a Pushcart numerous times, & one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

 

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