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Sport 31: Spring 2003
Soundings
Soundings
A room grows quieter when we are in it. You are a phrase I want to curl up inside for the rest of my life.
You keep getting up and leaving my sentences. Sometimes I can hear the sound of a thread travelling delicately through the hem of a curtain, a window closing. Perhaps our lives are whispered too softly, but by speaking I give you a name to vanish into. Your gestures bring the sound of pages turning into the room with us.
I woke you up because there's nothing to defend a sleeper from the light, your face twitching at the sunlight punctuating it—you'd left yourself lying so thoughtlessly around. When I sleep I dream of a room like this one, of two sleepers endangered by the mirror leaned incautiously against the wall. When we wake we don our reflections like last night's slept-in clothes.
The room is full of words neither of us want to speak. Were you aware a season would pass when you raised your hand? Waking up into another room altogether. Perhaps we have exhausted every possible room in the house, meaning gathering like dust along every windowsill. There's nowhere on your face now for a word to settle down.
page 137Suddenly there's room in the bedroom for doubt, and you turn away to accommodate it so that only your listening back faces me. What darkness there is in the room will gather there. If I let my eyes wander along the line of your gaze I would simply meet up with myself in another room. You frown, as if the colour of thewalls mismatched the colour of your eyes. In a single gesture, you life your shadow from the wall. Your cheeks are lit by the pages of the book you are reading.
Was it for my sake that someone has left those stray lights in your hair, that curve of the ear? You kiss my lips lightly, a figure of speech for silence. The bed is unstable, our gestures slip onto the floor between us, your forehead tips toward my touch.
What is this, a love scene? My hand on your thigh, your head on my stomach, a trap in two parts. I scratch your ribcage, elbow your groin. I startle parts of the body that don't have a name. You enjoy my feet, innocent as they are of any attempt to seduce you. We are a wrinkle in the sheet that no amount of making can smooth over.
We go round orchestrating small accidents, skewing the cushions, unsettling the curtains. These rooms take place in chapters, without event. I look at the chair when you leave the room and it is a chair in which you have recently been sitting.