(Greyish Bluish)

[madscenes]

Title: Greyish Bluish
Comment: A summer project.
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SHE looks up where the pale light is draped across the roadways, the road users this morning are grateful for nothing. Even such a mild winter feels merciless, in crackling black and white it devours her spirit. The cloudburst has poured itself in a millimetre manner out over the city for an entire half day and appears to continue as well, it’s already difficult to imagine it ever stopping, the clammy-wet skin and the crystal coldness in her bones, in her legs. Only slowly does she move through the rain. Her hair is drenched, her lips are chapped, unlike her these things can’t be calmed or whatever else such promenades might be called. Not even with bundles of yellow and orange roses under her arm does the sun feel closer than God. Can the wool over your eyes turn grey, she thinks, wonders to herself, the way it can look blue like her grandmother’s kitchen utensils and the airier summer sky.

She doesn’t put the roses in white vases, the snowlike colourlessness shan’t be allowed to dampen the hues of the petals, whatever they may profess to, the colour yellow or a warmer shade. She places them on the windowsill, urges them to invoke the light outside, feed off the sun’s moderations, in the same way she pretends the wrinkled folds of the corolla can keep the rays in handfuls.

Trapped.

Locked away she is in the city’s gloom, beneath this amount of grey clouds, among these many long brick wall corridors, grey, heaven and earth melt together and she stands very still in the middle of it all, trembles around the shoulders, around the corners of her mouth, but otherwise she only moves slowly.

Away.

She puts distance between herself and the windows, the view is discouraging, even her vibrant roses are buried in the greyish notes.

The darkness of dusk and slushy dimness.

YOU must be Francesca.

After you began haunting this neighbourhood, I asked around, I found your name discarded in the streets beneath the arching blues of the sky. Francesca it echoes between the walls that don’t know you any better than I do, you are a stranger to them. You are dewy fresh and new, at every step across the uneven stones of the alleyway floor your skirt trembles, also in blues. And it is pleated, it falls to your knees. The boys throw their gazes at you, they fall before your feet. The boys and their gazes. I’m pausing at the flower seller’s stand, I stay upright by grabbing on to a promise of armfuls of sunset-coloured roses, later they will adorn my bedroom’s windowsill, they will deck my kitchen, my living room, they will dress wherever I happen to be. I imagine you’d be a greater decoration, but I remain standing, because we are each other’s unknown quantities. As you move past me and additionally in dance, you comment on my flowers, but I’ve forgotten whether they were words of praise. You are dewy fresh and new, at every step across the uneven stones of the alleyway floor your skirt trembles and soon after, you are gone.

Somewhere in the city people are gathering, dancing, there I go, because there a spirit like yours must be found, I think and yes - in Saint Peter’s church you belong, not as a nun and not as a bride, God forbid, but as the muse of music, its physical form.

In the chapel of the church, they devote themselves to their instruments, but in the streets we’re not as devout, we only play with the sounds coming from the open doorway. With our feet, we write ballads in the dust and drink out of every melodious slope. We clink glasses, we cry, our heels crack and our sandals clap in time. Like me, you can be a street singer, you inspire at ground level, the toes of your shoes draw great big O’s across the crevices between the stones, I breathe deeply, I fill my lungs with airmail from you.

Finally we lay eyes on each other. Our gazes meet. Before us, before us.

Like this, you remind me of the roses back home, the only two left are standing on my night table now and one, the most beautiful, I’ve saved for you, Francesca.

You suit each other.

THE BED only looks like another wasteland, the duvet weighs down, it drags her naked form down into the mattress. A swamp existence she’s lived for so long, look, in the meantime the roses have come and they have gone again, despite of how beautifully framed they were by the living room window’s glass and with neutral clouds for background. Some fleeting associates they make of themselves, these. Things. And flowers.

In the winter landscape of the bedroom, the damp pillow case instead feels like an eternity.

Away.

Two words exist side by side, in her consciousness, the world outside the window with its fatal greyness which comes pouring down, clouds melting into the asphalt and then, the inner world behind the walls of her trembling eyelids. It is light and beautiful and warm of heart it is. Also the dust on the backside of the bricks of the eyelids is grey, if it isn’t brown with grey streaks, like a pair of female eyes can look, seeing far, seeing further.

She fills her cavities with fantasies, but also with other gasses does she not give a damn about herself, so she soon appears smaller and smaller in the narrow framework of the bed.

If you could make the motifs of the Romantic painters come alive, the perfect Neapolitan pictures, the one hundred years of summer, she would, but she barely even feels herself in her sensitiveness to cold, her body has been frozen, it has withered away, her arms and her legs, her blinking eyelids that call her surroundings in and out of focus. These days she stares up at the ceiling without looking elsewhere, the shadows greet her. Fresh as spring they play with her stiff gaze. Maybe she must, maybe she can, maybe she will wake from her hibernation before she can follow Silkeborg Road to De Meza’s Street to where they both become Frederik’s Avenue, to where the three run together into one starting point.

From the bridge crossing the train station tracks, the distance to the museum, to Aros, seems manageable, she has heard someone claim and from this self-imposed beginning, a vacation to Italy must finally be within reach. She wants it so much.

Away.

The duvet weighs her down, pulls her down into the mattress. As such she goes nowhere.

BENEATH the waving, blue sky, you seem statuesque, the way you put yourself on display at the plaza, your hips are swaying, your back is straight, a curve draws itself along the corner of your mouth and the tourists take pictures of the monument first, then they take pictures of you. You are the city’s very soul, its centre, its innermost, you won’t take the place of the martyrs, you only conquer what is your own. You exist without making any great sacrifices. I admire you across a distance that I am not at liberty to overcome, not yet, not yet.

It is hot. It is dusty. It is noisy. Sorbets and oranges are being sold from a cart that has been set up, to the right.

Freely is never how you present your hand, rather you are a grant to be given. Those who hold the most between their hands, hold the most between their legs, they are allowed to run off with you. I have nothing but newly bought passionfruits to offer, passionfruits and pink lemonade to quench your thirst, Francesca. Still, I am ready to run.

I am ready to run off. With you.

One day we meet again, we find ourselves face to face in a side street where you can buy yourself poor, you are alone and so am I. On our left lies a villa that, like its past, has fallen into shade, behind us the plaza is thriving, we are no further from the things that hold us together or from each other. My passionfruit I pour out of the bag's paper depths, they roll along tiny paths before your feet and you pick one up, a scrap of my devotion lies in your hands, the rest has fallen to time, like the house.

You laugh and hold out the fruit. Towards me, but I leave it to its happy ignorance in your grip.

Lady Emma you must know, I tell your outstretched hand, the slender lines of your fingers, this is her home. Great she was amongst the fallen, greater yet amongst the recuperated, I say and you are made from the same mold, you grow out of the dust, rank yourself alongside queens, with ease. I say, I am no ambassador or English admiral, but I too will wait for love far into my forties, if merely you are the lover and the beloved, subject and object, all my sentences in full. All my sentences' meaning.

You and Lady Emma, you can both go to the one who holds the most between their ribs.

I take neither my passionfruits nor you with me home, my apartment feels fruitless under the weight of evening, the coming of day. The sun burns in red and orange, it puts the water of the bay to a boil. At the centre of Earth everything already boils, it is like a lovesick soul in there, but Vesuvius sleeps through lesser emotional outbursts than its own.

My bed is in the order of one to a thousand and I drag time around with me, from room to room, in one place I wash my hands, in the next I clean my heart's surfaces, on the livingroom's windowsill two withered roses are dyed glowing again by the last stages of sunset.

Those and not you do I take with me into the bedroom.

A BELL-LIKE creature, she moves through the quietness of winter, around her the rain is drowning every sound’s voluminosity and takes down sound waves. The city centre is greying, the side streets and the smaller streets are greying, what is greying she can’t escape, although she walks long distances at her own pace. They greyness follows in her footsteps and at the same speed.

On top of the museum the rainbow sits enthroned, the rainbow that thrashes around itself with colour, december too is breaks into coloured pieces, bathes equal parts in red and orange, in gold and fir. It’ll be Christmas soon, a small boy further ahead yells, he’s about six years old and his eyes still unaccustomed with reality. He doesn’t know, unlike her, that what reigns is in greys.

Even so she admires the circular shape for a long time, the one they call a rainbow, the enclosed colours, the entire constructions inherent genius, she wonders. Does the shades of the glass throw the permanent collection in a colourful bloom, are the Romantic paintings on green fire now, on yellow fire?

Blue.

Once, she went to the Glyptotek, it was a school trip and on the wall a painting was hanging, Italian Osteria Scenery it was called, from 1847, it was a piece by Marstrand and she still remembers the bright colours, the alluring gazes of the two young women, their eyes were dark, but not in greys, the difference is of the utmost importance, they looked at her as if she was being invited inside, as if she had an honour for them to toast to.

It was summer, that time she went to the Glyptotek, in the king’s Copenhagen, when her honour was still intact and she had friends of another world and in this eternal moment, in front of brush strokes from more golden days, the sun shone both inside and out.

No greys existed. Not yet, not yet.

BY the bay one really lives, water is the most life-giving of the elements, the fire burns as an afterthought, though it is rumbling in the horizon. Listen, the volcano plays up the dramatics, as other things do that like to make themselves known. You have left a trail of oranges from my doorstep to this corner of the beach, here and there your signposts have been lost, I suppose they have fed a poor, hungry soul or a rascal on the way, but I found my way here effortlessly, I heard your call.

Here I am, here I am.

Together we will become more beautiful than any painting, you tell me and kiss my wrist, my arm, my shoulder, no motif can replicate our very special art form, we are bathing in an indescribable glow, we are creatures of the light, we are light itself, you and I. Destiny has dressed us in the same beach dress, in blue and in orange. Yes, I say, you and I, Francesca, we are more beautiful than all of art history. Above our heads the sky is summery, blue, almost see-through in its clarity, if we wanted and if we needed to, we would probably be able to glimpse a paradise through the mist, but it is your face that I have fallen in love with, not something so virginal as the times that come only to pass.

Eternity, they say, comes in large enough quantities.

THE LIGHT lives on in their eyes, the girls in Marstrand’s osteria, in print, in spite of the black lustre of their gazes and she frames the postcard in a rectangular shape from IKEA, hangs in on the wall. With roses in vases and oranges in the bowl on the table’s treated wood surface, she thinks, it looks almost like somewhere else, another world, her surroundings have dressed up like a town by which vulcanos keep watch and grottos shine like liquid sapphire.

If she can simply live there in the seconds where her existence lies hidden behind closed eyelids, she will be happy for at least half her life.

It’s enough time. Winter can have the rest.