Claire Ortalda 

  

      Your Mouth at Rest

Your mouth at rest was very beautiful. It had the shape of a lover reclining on a lawn, head resting on hand and the curve of hip corresponding to the place on your lip that was the plumpest, where I liked to put my tongue. I want to tell you:  the doves we saw in the driveway are building a nest under the eaves. They have such sweet faces. We were doves in spring.  I need you like air.

Nights are the worst. I’m so tired. I lie on the couch, my eyes searching the ceiling, though there is nothing there, not even an interesting pattern of water stain. I can feel the small muscles at the sides of my eyes stretching to deny me sleep. I stare, aching, longing for soft blackness. I finally sleep, but only when I should be getting up, my body in a tense cramp like a fetus in rigor mortis, until a peculiar beam of light, as yellow and hard as a new-cut two-by-four, slants perfectly straight from the corner of the drape into my eyes and wakes me.

I had a dream in which my father made me sign my name ten times, but when I read what I had written, I saw that it was his name I had signed. What an invasion, worse than any other. I have signed the papers for the death of my identity. They will stand up in court. No longer does he have to arrange my limbs like a corpse in a casket or a rubbery doll. I do what he wants before he wants it.

The dream makes me wonder if the heavy suffocation of my past killed you, murdered you in our bed -- the weight of sadness, the shrouded chest, like the lead blanket put over you at the dentist for X-rays.  You feel you can’t move under it, that it is pressing on your heart, that your lungs will collapse. You take breath with open mouth. That is what’s happening with me because it happened to you. I gasp for you, I claw at the cover of depression.

Sometimes it feels like ear muffs or a strangulating scarf a parent wraps around a child’s head to protect it. Noise is deadened but, as with breath under the lead of blankets, you claw to hear. Sound is like air. You need it. You are cut off as surely as a hand across the windpipe. Because people are noise – the gurgle of their bodies, speech, laughter, harsh yells like crows. Without the noise of people, you start to die. Without the sound of you, I struggle to inhale.

The emptinTss of our home together, one cup of tea, one spoon. Time in the bathroom swift, hiding from the mirror. The bedroom cold, unused, smelling like the air before a storm, the closet luring me with your scent on the clothes, still hanging there like men who have died. If I bury my face in your shirts, I will never get out of the closet. It will be my tomb, surrounded by you.