~::the song italia. lchristopher.

subjects. caroline & wyndham earle . the concept of the jim crow christmas. the cu in the black lodge, which is really a red room; doppleganger; doppleganger, make a wish.

 the song italia. lchristopher    

Noa Lenore, we are singing together.  The ancient Chinese thought opium to be the flowers of the blood and sometimes when I feel old I think to her - why, there's nothing wrong. I cannot make her understand that it is just a matter of vanity. I want to love myself inside and I want flowers in my blood. It’s just the flowers in my blood. 

Here on the other side of town Noa sprawls herself across the coverlet decorating her bed, this shoebox room. Her turntable is spinning laps towards and around the hours of midnight. The couches are plush mauve plums. Her child crackles in the womb. Euthanasia calls the doctor in times like these, and she is not afraid. She never allows her body to exceed the statute of limitations, she tells me. 

When there were eclipses her mother would keep her inside to save her from damaging her eyes. The light has been eclipsing for twenty years. She collects ashtrays of blown smoked glass. A small calico kitten bats the Venetian blind cord in the mornings. There are no clocks here and so it is a way of keeping time without electricity, it is an alarm timed for the dawn. 

 Noa is in the kitchen. She is in the kitchen singing. She isn’t mindful of my narcotic infidelities, and why should she be? We are still young, invincible, strong. We don’t yet realize the nightly news involves us directly. We drink wine from the bottle and smoke cigarette ends we find on the stairwell. It is easy to do, leaving responsibility inchoate and less confused. 

What is that you are singing, I ask her and she tells me about The Song Italia. The first time a boy kissed her in Milan. How the spring felt, an early frost, a simple green skirt, ankle-length. His hand against her thigh. I feel lonely when I sing, she says. 

Why don’t you take up the guitar, I tell her, an acoustic guitar, with riffs and chords and valleys. And there would be calluses on your fingertips and they would scratch little sighs into my belly when we lay awake at night in the sticky heat, heat because we could not afford air-conditioning for the house was new and built on poor design. And your songs would have strings to sit upon like birds lighting and landing off the telephone wires. 

Her voice grows deeper, scratched from tobacco and lush. Her hips have widened and I wonder sometimes if she has perhaps caught pregnancy, like a cold from being in love, and the special hugs we give each other. Explanations like a child, and I think of accents, umlauts, and hash marks. Numbers of apartments, dollar signs. SOS. 

She is singing. I light my cigarette and let the smoke settle down across my palms, my dinner that cools, keeping time with the stuttering of the single cherry-scented candle, which stutters and falters, changing my vision into a series of jumpcuts as I watch you make up the plates for me to clean the dishes. It is like a chamber of a revolver ticking over. White drawers, drainboard, black slip, calves of pale white. Bones peeking through. Your eyes brown. You would hold your mouth open for me before you turned in to read and the birds would fly out, getting lost in our mouths, the feather-touch of our tongues scribbling soft reminders of why people sleep spooning, side by side.

I’d rather be Icaurus than Daedulus any day, you said. 

The words you sing are Italian but across your chest and around your neck is a star, a star of David, and it is jeweler’s steel, stainless and you don’t talk much about it. 

Your parents they live in modern-day Levittowns made of prefabrication and sheet rock, and the first time I stole a Chevrolet to come see you in the middle of the night you had told me to look out for the sign marking *your development*. All of the old ways have been lost. Keep singing to me, I whisper, gentile and tired. Don’t stop. 

Passing each other in elevators. We take the mail in late and I watch the neighbors forget to have the oil changed on their automobiles, the sounds of engines rattling themselves apart from lack of lubrication and love. You attune to the clothing suicides from the landlines that pass between apartment buildings, because that is how we cover our backs since The Fall. The rent dissolves in the back of our minds, as latent as sugar-water, and we forget to go to work. Our hold on things slows down. 
                                    *     *     * 
After we left town I found a place for us that the local toughs had deserted after a mass arrest at a local bar, built amongst the reeds and railcars on the outskirts of New Constantine. I remember shaving our heads against the lice by the railroad track, the abandoned switching station, 1 and ½ miles from town. The tapwater clouded with the rust colored blossoms of discoloration. Our nudity inbetween clothes washings. Our toes scratched Christlike and bleeding through the chaff and gravel that so surrounds electric tracklines. Skin and hair and white skin wrinkling in the dawn. There was a room that was still wired that no one knew about. 

It ran off the track current somehow. My father the television repairman showed me wires and electronics when I was younger. There was a small refrigerator and a ceramic hotplate. We could make hot sandwiches on the iron. The bed was 5 inches thick and when we shook it out every week we never caught bugs. She grew flowers outside and they took right up until the moment she left. I stayed in that brick sidecar with her for 2 years, the marks on my arms fading into the yellow skin, my strength returning. 

The abandoned switching station with its pluvial cellar and its woodburning stove, the heavy hemp blankets and the kitten we found curled in a chipped porcelain teacup, starving, too hungry to mew. You saved its life as I picked up a brick to smash it for I thought it was a rat, you said my name, and that was our first year. You had finished university and I taught you about jazz and firearms, the .22 pistol we found and used to shoot small game. You hated guns then. You hated guns before you learned to fear people. 

Cigarettes were still cheap and the only reason we went to town anymore; we got such lovely sun in the mornings - once we woke up to a train crew working on a track further up the line with their reflective vests and tanned forearms and sledgehammers that were clotted with grease. We hid in the brush. We tanned naked in the granite fields of industry they left behind, all unquarried rock, no trees, just deep, clear pools that caught the sunset and held it, impossibly, up to an hour after night had fallen.  

We take up space in the doctor’s home that winter, she was sick, catching her legs on rusty wire strung up to keep the homeless from camping on the estates nearby. Sometimes there were beartraps and pits dug out by earthmovers, steamshovels. Human traps set in a most affluent America. The doctor was almost the same age as I and looked at her like an animal. I could have killed him then and pocketed his well-fed, hyper-educated eyes. 

She has an infection. It is a bad one. He prescribes us the cheapest drug there is and serves contempt with a handful of vitamin supplements. 

Is this what it is like after you are raised by wolves I say to her after smashing open a parking meter and paying the druggist in nickels and dimes, twenty dollars worth. My hands were bleeding from the effort. 

And she says, let’s not ever go back to the city, let’s us stay right here. 
You could have died, Jane. You could have died.
 
We quit smoking that night and took up storytelling and firesides. 

We learned to spit our lungs out from the withdrawal. I could spit more, you further. 

When we go to town, to the City, we have to scrub. Too many questions otherwise. We chew tree bark to clean our teeth when our toothbrushes wear down. Jane cuts my hair and braids her own back behind her head, out of the way. She cuts my hair and slices my ear, like Van Gogh you are, you are to me, she says. I decide that night I am in love, that this is what it means. 

I don’t want to grow up I say. I don’t want to be insane. 
Not even for art? 
Not even for art. Art is the inability to see things as an adult. 
Distant electric vision is what they used to call television. Do you miss television? 
No. 
Can we move again? 
It’s only been two years. 
I’m restless. 
Give it time. 
I’m trying. 
Try harder. 
I’m trying. 

She spoke of distant electric vision and miles mean nothing to me, so I left her and the chemicals together, something I should not have done. So in time we had to move and change accordingly, a place where the familiar could just not reach. I took her quickly to the freight railyard after stealing a retired taxicab from the local junkyard, trading out the battery and the oil. 

It died en route, but we were close enough for me to carry her. She was so thin, then. She was almost too weak to make the leap aboard the moving boxcar, but I caught her and held her tightly for two days until the shaking stopped. 

 *     *      *   

So here we are in Georgia and the roads are colder and we don't think much about misgivings out here. The house is warped, it bends in the hole the sun makes, but there are no more poppies, and so all of the telescopes and mirrors behind our eyes refract correctly. Noa sits in the passenger seat of our old Dodge, her short hair twisted into knots that stand up on their own like pencil erasers. Jane is the perfect 4  name for her this time and we all call her Jane even though Jane is not her real name, her name is Noa. Back in Wayside Beach her name was Heather Lewis and we pulled her curls when we wanted attention. 

But we call her Jane now because she likes the girls and sometimes boys and sometimes it doesn't matter because I know her and she knows me and all she wants is a crisis of identity, she needs to disappear but knows too much.   She knows that I have a small cataract birthmark on my right testicle and I know her labia are large and tickle my nose, sometimes when we are inside the night, and with the night, looking for some primal sort of release before the dawn, and then she is sleeping while I watch through the storm windows, waiting for the traffic lights to change. She teaches herself the manual transmission on my car while I sit in the west room on the second floor, reading. Our cat, Green, bats the typewriter lever and I hear the gears grinding but somehow I don't care. She calls me from her job when Anne, her boss, wears a short dress. Anne's slips are myriad and ever changing. Today was blue and even as she gives me head on our secondhand couch and I try to smooth the aperture of my life into some kind of sweet, swift focus - I sit back and marvel and rejoice in the fact that today, Anne, some woman that I have never met was wearing a blue slip and somehow it was all right. 

 ***   

Sometimes when Jane sits by the windows I can see right through her clothes, they become translucent in the sun. Sometimes the room is dark and overripe and her figure seems too smeared, to me. And sometimes she just lies naked and says “paint me”. I sit down. I sit down by the coverlet on the unmade bed and say, “Jane, you were born in 1974 in a small convent in Topeka, Kansas. Your father disowned your mother because you were both Irish Catholics and you were borne with black hair, although your mother and your daddy's hair was red. You lived seventeen years and in those seventeen years you have spent going over with a small eraser. Soon, there will be nothing left and you will be in the womb again.” And she will smile and hold my head in her small girl hands and say `you are a chauvinist and a pauper but I like you anyway.' And I will tell her: “You are a cunt and sometimes a lesbian but I am glad you are here”. Then we fall asleep in the middle of the day, wondering who the hell is paying our rent and whom the house really belongs to but it not mattering overmuch. Jane has had two abortions in her lifetime and is good at paring reality aside. 

Her boss Anne was wearing a cream-colored slash of white lace on the morning I learned that my father had died. He would never go to funerals and I was too far away from home to even make his a consideration, but I did have his reading glasses in my uppermost desk drawer. When I am lost I put them on and the world seems more blurred. Migraine sets in but my thoughts get clearer and I don't pretend to understand why. Jane was in the bedroom and the slip was draped over a nail on the bathroom door. When she left there were blonde hairs on my pillow and they smelled of chamomile and insouciance and a respiration so thick that when I pulled the lace away I could almost taste the screams. Her sweat was strong and Jane, she told me that she loved me. Our goodnight kiss swelled of marine but my father, he, he had never taught me what it was like to swim in times like these. 

And there are classes and then they are over with, and hands that have been where they 5 shouldn’t be, with people they didn’t know, and when the gunshots come – as they are known to do in Lisbon, GA - he wakes suddenly and carries her without speaking to the porcelain tub in the bathroom, because he knows that it is steel underneath. There is not room for two, so I read a newspaper through the ember of my tenth cigarette of the morning, not wanting to draw attention to this tiny attic room. The apartment must have been the superintendent’s, he has decided, because proportionally it is half the size of the pre-war high-ceilings below, this brownstone from the 1890’s. 

It is morning and the cats are poking their noses into everything, as it is grocery day and the smell of Cuban bread fills the kitchen. It is a dollar a loaf and worth ten times that amount when assimilated with cinnamon and butter, or salted garlic with sun dried tomato slices, thin like guitar picks or a blade of grass, soft as ash. The fruit she steals from the stand from which she works keeps him strong mornings. Sometimes her words make money. 

We take our lunches like businessmen, like kings and queens. There are fresh cut flowers on the edge of the bath, and twin glasses of gin, tonic and ice. The sun sweats through the blinds to pore over her breasts, my eyes. We are 28 years old. It is a birthday, a holiday. There are rooms without reason, envelopes for time that we mail away carelessly, bill me later, bill me later, bill me later. 

Richard Nixon is on the television and Jane is on the phone, but it is not 1974 any longer. We have stolen a hotel room for the night on our trip to see the doctor, she is pregnant again. Jane asks me if she should shave her legs. “Why?” I reply. 

Her dress is a thin black thing with a red design cutting through the opaqueness of it all, like a black widow or an eclipse of some kind. She wears it each year on her birthday and mother’s day. Her day dress she wears all other times, it is ragged and the hem is slipping. She takes it over her head as the seven o clock steam whistle cuts into the evening.   

I make her cake in the wood burning stove. The telephone sings the same old song. When we hear a song we know, we crave the repetition; we desire the hold of knowing what will happen next. I did not know her name would change, I did not know that she would remain with me. Men are not strong enough to watch women disintegrate. Women can, in times of war, watch men blow fragments of themselves all over the battlefield, and coo to them, and shudder inwardly at our idiocy. We are the weak and therefore the instruments behind which countries fall. 

The telephone sings years later and I am almost used to it. Her white slip is open at the collar, her pale neck, and the unpainted cerise curl of her lower lip, her pageboy haircut. The Rolling Stones are on and Mick Jagger is lamenting the sadness that comes with fellatio. The moon is out and it is a week that she is not bleeding. I don’t want to grow up, she said, and it was the year we figured out the phones and computers and realization. The year we rejoined society.

You were dirty and your fingernails ragged but I loved you that way. 

Do you do you really? 
Yes. Many kinds of really. All sorts. 
You’re sweet to say.  
I love you, Jane Alice Weatherbee. 
Who was I the first time? 
Noa, like the ark. You had two of everything. 

Sipping Sangria in the fields, I wanted to make love to her right there and such moments should be seized. My son is galumphing through the twenty acres of foliage that stand on a lot and a house that is bought with only fifteen years left on it. A hell of a beautiful mess, I think, and tell my wife that it is wonderful when things turn out all right. She smiles and takes my hand and leads me to the fields beyond our property where we pretend like children of the past. For our children, to better understand. The song has changed but we remain the same. It is a song of hellos and goodbyes, but all I want is right here.

 FIN - lchristopher 2025-9-10 1308hrs loveyouall.