( Odilisk )

[madscenes]

Title: Odilisk
Comment: Dark scripture.
__________

To your Odile
and to mine.








“You are mine.”
Thus it speaks when seeking her out.








Lustrous, black feathers during the day. Lustrous, black hair at night. Black eyes. Darkness for skin. It is a shadow in the surface of the water, a shadow amongst the trees. The drapery of silk appears a collapsed cosmos around its shape.








Without stars they are.
Together.

You turn off the television, before the curtain call commences, you hear no one clap. The final act is more short-lived. It’s how it goes. It’s how it is supposed to go. You are surrounded by things, many things, heavy things, things which pull at you and wear you out, you are surrounded by people in white. Their opposites shroud you. The greys do and the nuances of black, but in their whiteness those people hold you back, they make slow progress. The final act is constantly the short-lived one. This is the way it was, this is the way it must remain. This is the way you prefer it.

Now.
And then.

No one except me sees her as she is in the sunshine, she doesn’t even recognise herself. With her smile glued to her face and the words rolling off her tongue, she gropes her way out, through a jungle of grey in light. Light in grey. On winding paths in a forest with growing pains she stumbles in zigzag between appointments, arrangements, from purchase to purchase. They are all of the best intentions. Here and there she is. Everywhere she is. I follow her at a distance, hanging in the horizon like a fog. Like a cloudful of rain. She blossoms in her joy, goes to seed wherever she is going, but nothing sprouts forth. I step the shoots underfoot, close off her footprints in frost, because come sunset, yet another hour of darkness will follow. Then the turn shall be mine. Again. She is not the only one to return. I am loyal to the extreme border, to the final second.

From the fir tree, the owl big-eyes her. On the lake, the swan glides past, its neck in a sling. The birds flutter about their castles in the air. She is thinking of me, her thoughts always return. Should they stray, they stray like a pack of sheepdogs and I remind her of my presence with a whistle. Because I am every bird she might wish to hold between her hands, I have landed on her shoulders, but tame me she cannot. I am an uneasiness, a wilderness, I am owl hunts and swan flight. I am the wingspan of every bird, I know the roads to my goal. In the beginning, she stood her ground, she stood on the ground and clung to her cage, but I am larger than any captivity, I am larger than four corners, I pour out over the ends of the Earth and with me, she can only fly. She can only fall.

Either she is too big for her body or too small for her thoughts, she doesn’t know which and I am not telling her the truth. That she doesn’t fit into herself. I make greater demands than her physique, because I apply pressure nowhere. Unlike what her chest does or her shoulders. Unlike her back. Instead I leave my signature everywhere, but that kind of pain is understandable. It obviates translations, it is freely interpreted. With love, as long as she doesn’t see me in my colours and in my feathers, as long as I am not recognisable. So long does she find comfort in my objections. Her head I graze with my claws and she feels after the sting. I kiss her temple with a pointy beak and she accepts the bloodletting, blood she knows what is, the blood makes the pain an order. In itself.

Back and forth I push her. For every shove she quivers in fear. From excitement, she is pulled out and tugged in, she stretches at the movement. Takes contact. She is like the grass, just as manipulable, just as perishable and I am like the wind. I take hold of her thoughts. Like the autumn leaves, she is soon in the air, flying, first and then under the heel of a boot. Pushed deep down, into the mud, into the darkness. I allow her to run, so she will long for my frame, the width of my embrace and the pronunciation of my name. The more she misses me, the further out she gets. I feel like home, even the cats who otherwise prefer to draw circles around themselves have learned to accept me and on my terms. While she spins around on the painful tip of her toes, while she is thrown about by my exposed intimacy, I make all the fickle ones purr. The cats as well as her. The room is quiet, it is disquiet. Her entire being listens. Her entire being hears every sound.

Often she is to be found amongst others, but she doesn’t dare move. She doesn’t dare touch them, touches only me and touches me only by the wingtips. By the edge of my feathers she holds on, doesn’t know about herself, doesn’t know her own values, they have been wrapped in plastic which is to see through. All the world looks inside, she thinks, they study her innermost, she thinks and they triumph. She thinks. They see her cringing, wanting to be swallowed by the ground, but I catch her around the shoulders with my hooked claws, lift her up above the shame and the doubt. In free air, on her way to an even freer fall, I leave her to hang and when I let go, when I dump her back into her consciousness, she only just finds the time to love me. The second before. When she has landed, she hates me regardless and she hates me again. To her heart’s content.

The hunt keeps its own records, in stages it unfolds. First I measure her by looks, she balances with no stability on the straight line of my gaze. A victim, I think with a smile clinging to my mouth, before I choose my approach, with claws I take hold, it is the second phase. Not until she carries the scar tissue I granted her like underwear, like something intimate do I release her. Once again. Hereafter my impressions intrude on her beneath her outermost layers. Finally she hangs limply from my extremities, I take upon myself her many tons of thought. She asks for clearness of the mind and I fulfill her wish like the helper out of a fairytale, like a friend I step in, drop her onto the hardest surface of reality. Away I only give her, because she will find her own ways back. In nightly time. Also when asleep. The hunt does not even cease in her dreams.

It isn’t me that she fears, I only make her more afraid than she was born to be. From the beginning. Anxiety I send out into her bloodstream, I let her quiver with concern for the progress of time, the coming of night. On our good days, it all threatens her, she is reduced to sparrows and mice, to prey and undeniably, she is happy to see me, because I am the fear she knows best. On these earthquaking days, she embraces me desperately, would rather be afraid of my shadow than her own, than the white of her eyes, the blackness in her body. I hold her. I keep her to a promise about the end that will come, the end that will follow in my footsteps. I keep her to a promise that there is nothing to fear, once her eyelids have fallen shut. In the end. Then I am loved to the edge. By her. Sleeping on my chest, she hopes never again to wake up.

My love she won’t know of, it is too violent, it exerts pressure, it thrashes about, she spins on the tip of her toes, she covers from it, so I must love her with my claws. She squirms like prey, when I hold on to her. Bloody I leave her, in the darkness I leave her, but such is my love, it doesn’t bring flowers. I move up behind her back, my breath desires her neck and I feel her vibrating into her very bones. Something is still beating within the void of her chest, I can hear it, it used to be a heart, now it is assembled of sin and grief, of ashes. I have burned her, I have burned her to the ground and now she avoids me. Like the fire. Like the plague. Like death I love her. My love hurts.

She hates me most, most panicked, most passionate, when she sees herself in me. We live with a mirror between us, glass grows in our midst, she meets me often. On eye-level. She hates me for every gaze, every blink. She is beautiful in her bleakness, I smile at her. I smile like her, but more sharply. With razor blades at the corners of my mouth. I breathe like her, but more heavily. With lead at the bottom of my lung capacity. Our mirror is framed in gold, but the paint is flaking off and underneath, it is black. She looks like me, but I am stronger, I float above the weights, I fly, while she is sinking, while she is drowning in herself. Once I leaned so close that I could taste her. I took a bite of her neck. A chunk of her thigh. Those parts I carry with me. Up. Above. Those parts of her shan’t perish, in pieces she shall live forever.

The cats know, the cats know about me. I exhale in hisses, down my back my hair slips. She wants to know when I will arrive, but were she to ask the cats, she wouldn’t need to wait for what my tiptoes leave unsaid. Because I evade her, she doesn’t notice how my lightest steps draw closer, but the cats hear me, the cats always expect me, the cats welcome me at the door with pupils big as night, pupils full of a well-like darkness. She never expects me, her memory is like something full of holes, her memory is like something in halves, in between every new appearance she forgets about me again. I calm her down with a purr, but my purring sounds like an owl’s playing swan, like a bird’s playing tricks. In my purring no quiet is to be found.

My weight I can’t carry on flat feet, I have claws, they leave scars in the landscape. An impotence hangs about her like a drizzle, an impotence hangs about the thicket, about the trees. The branches are weighed down. The leaves weigh out. They repeat themselves, throw off droplets. We reflect each other in negatives and are not called by the same name. How she wishes we shared less than scenes. In her feverish dreams she imagines, I can’t move into her form. She imagines that I won’t. She once dreamt that I did not possess that power, but the power is my father, the power is my first-born. Like all her dreams, this dream is dying, like her it has stones tied to its wing feathers. They sink to the bottom. The stones, the dream and her. I take so many shapes, hers as well. Her shape, too, I will take one day.

As such she thinks that she is tricking me by letting the current put her above the crowd, it makes her do capers, she needs not touch the bottom with so much as a tiptoe. On a surface level, she floats past her life and sends reflections of smiles to her next of kin, to her neighbour, everything around the corner. My mirror image follows her progress closely, the ripples in the water eat up my features and she doesn’t recognise me on the long term. I stay above, at the heights where my kind belongs, from where I have a view. To the fall that is coming. The fall that follows when she will not let herself be dragged down. In spite of herself. Instead she will fall long and hard, the bottom will hit her first, while she imagines that I gave her wings on which to fly away. In due time.

She is ready. She tugs at me, she asks me to visit and I am not late to accept. With my wings I shield her from all doubt, while she says goodbye to the earth, to the flesh. In her most reliable handwriting. Parting is otherwise not for her to do with anyone, not face to face and me she needs never greet, I will be with her. From this moment and until the end. The end which has made its entry, I was harnessed to its carriage, the greatest decisions are carried forth by tawny owls. She greets them with an excuse, but this time no opinions are changed. Her name wobbles in its lines, until I steady her hand, I make the full stop strong, the full stop big. The door slams shut behind us both, when she leaves, she has not brought any keys with her. She doesn’t intend to return. You can tell.

The water is calling for her, it calls in my voice and she doesn’t know whether she should answer, whether she should go. For the sound. The water would like to meet her. The water would like to know who she has become, since the time when they knew each other gently and waving in mother’s womb. I have no mother, my mother is the moon and the moon doesn’t give birth to babies, the moon bears only bats and owl spawn into the world. I float above the water, because I may stick deeply, but a creature of the surface I remain, the descent she must do on her own. I wait for her above, the water waits as well. The air bubbles are her only clue to what road to take, our only clue to what road she chose. In her honour the lake goes still, it is the undercurrents that cradle her and I stand equally still in the air. Souls know only one way.

You can glimpse the water from your window. In the mix of moonlight and darkness, it has turned blue, it no longer holds the transparency of its nature. They say, you can do everything by thought alone, the people do and dress all in white, but even the swan went under, even the swan sank. You can’t walk on water, maybe this navy blue precisely would work well as death. All that is almost black. Already. You long for the lake where it rests beneath a star-cleared sky. Out of your chains, you are longing. Out between the bars, out underneath the weight. It is drawing to a close.

The final act is the short-lived one.
You hear no one clap.

She has stretched out the darkness.
She has made darkness long like an eternity.