Tenebrae
BY HELEN MCCLORY
The bluebells are wet outside the window and in the dark we make coffee and stand looking over our plans, and talk to each other without moving our lips, or touching, or seeing one another. You disrobe and pull on old-fashioned trousers, shirt, braces. Wool, linen, nylon, metal. We have to finish something larger than ourselves. I disrobe and attire myself in an old-fashioned pair of trousers, shirt, braces, jumper. Wool, linen, nylon, metal, and wool again. I light seven candles in the library and carefully put them out one by one by blowing on them. You go out to the coop and call softly to the animals sleeping inside.
It’s always new, this work. I’ve found a place where the new things are born, all the time, down in the cells, and it hurts to think of it, let alone speak. I have found it often underneath the ivy. In the basket of tangled lights. In the filing cabinet, between key notes. My hands search for it as I sleep, voices murmuring lost pink mornings. There’s nothing frightening in the dark, knowing you are out there, when you are out there, when you are for me. By the front door, I light six candles and then, immediately, I blow them out. You catch the young mother, pillowy white, and gently remove her from the rest.
Rain due again today, mist tomorrow. It’s a grand thing. What we are doing has a name, but we don’t say that either. Everything is soundless. Then the trees hiss, magnitudes of green almost created, while down by the graves I am wholly occupied with my tasks. I light five candles and blow them out, one at a time. There is a hollow sound inside my ears when I press myself on the ground. A few tears spring out. You walk between the beds of phlox and foxglove, running your hand through invisible white, weighted and slender. It means something real. You are, in the faint blue light, handsome there, though not young.
Up the hill I climb, thinking of your bright glances, the way you look without me seeing you look. It’s always clean, this way. I have found you often in the doorways, leaning, or with one leg propped up, turning a bottle in your hands. At the top of the hill I am breathless, and lie down. There is a hollow sound. I begin my weeping. My breasts ache. You’ve never seen anything you didn’t think you could conquer, but you have not conquered this: I light four candles and I mimic the wind, guttering them, the smoke carrying over the rising valley. I walk homeward. We are beginning to make something that shouldn’t be new.
The trees around me hiss the truth, that we are involved in something larger than ourselves. I light three candles at the boundary wall to the fields, listening to the bleats of sheep and the distant traffic. You kill the creature and let her blood down on the garden path, on the worn stones, just as the sun splits earth from sky. By the gate I light two candles, putting them out with licked bare fingertip and thumb. I stand looking on the garden and think of you without looking, touching, saying a word to you. Through the window I see your hands are wet, and the bluebells too, their stems broken and leaves folded apart.
You come in and stand and I am all ready. You take off your clothes and leave them in a soft pile. You put on your robe. I am in mine. You do not look at me, and you do not touch me, and you do not say a word and we have to finish. There is something to all this, but I don’t know what it is. The windowpane rattles with the tendering of rain. Turning away, I find you in the back of me, drawing a line in the air with your thumb, before my skin, without touching me, without looking, without speech. What is forgotten is not quite lost. What denied, that too. I light one candle, and then I find it in me
to snuff it out, in one firm breath.
