Like
God,
you hover above the
page staring down
on a small town. Outside a window
some
scenery loafs in a sleepy hammock
of pastoral prose and here is a
mongrel
loping and here is a train approaching
the station in
three long sentences and
here are the people in galoshes
waiting.
But you know this story about the galoshes
is really
About Your Life, so, like a diver
climbing over the side of a boat
and down
into the ocean, you climb, sentence
by sentence, into
this story on this page.
You have been expecting
yourself
as a woman who purrs by in a dress
by Patou, and a
porter manacled to
the luggage, and a man stalking across
the
page like a black cloud in a bad mood.
These are your fellow
travelers and
you are a face behind or inside these
faces, a
heartbeat in the volley of these
heartbeats, as you choose, out of
all
the journeys, the journey of a man
with a mustache scented
faintly with
Prince Albert. "He must be a
secret
sensualist," you think and your awareness
drifts to his
trench coat, worn, softened,
and flabby, a coat with a lobotomy,
just
as the train pulls into the station.
No, you would
prefer another stop
in a later chapter where the climate
is
affable and sleek. But the passengers
are disembarking, and
you did not
choose to be in the story of the woman
in the white
dress which is as cool and
evil as a glass of radioactive milk.
You
did not choose to be in the story of the
matron whose bosom
is like the prow
of a ship and who is launched toward
lunch at
the Hotel Pierre, or even the
story of the dog-on-a-leash, even
though
this is now your story: the story of
the
person-who-had-to-take-the-train-and-walk-
the-dark-road
described hurriedly
by someone sitting at the tavern so you
could
discover it, although you knew all along
the road would
be there, you, who have
been hovering above this page,
holding
the book in your hands, like God,
reading.from Then,
Suddenly-- by Lynn EmanuelThe White DressHomage to Sharon StoneInventing Father in Las Vegas
On Waking after Dreaming of
RaoulThe
Dig
Last Updated: 08/07/99
Created By: J.H.
Brugos