Back at the house all was dark except a light from the porch.
_______
Herakles went to see. Geryon had a thought to call home and ran upstairs.
"You can use the phone in my mother's room
top of the stairs turn left," Herakles called after him. But when he reached the room
he stopped in a night gone suddenly solid.
Who am I? He had been here before in the dark on the stairs with his hands out
gropping for a switch - he hit it
and the room sprang torwards him like an angly surf with its unappeasable debris
of woman liquors, he saw a slip
a dropped magazine combs baby powder a tack of phone books a bowl of pearls
a teacup with water in it himself
in the mirror cruel as a slash of lipstick - he banged the light off.
He had been here before, dangling
inside the word "she" like a trinket at a belt. Spokes of red rang across his eyelids
in the blackness.
As he made his way downstairs again Geryon could hear the grandomther's voice.
She was sitting in the porch swing
with her hands in her lap and her feet dangling. A rectangle of light
fell across the porch from the kitchen door
and just touched her hem. Herakles lay flat on his back on top of the picnic table,
both arms across his face.
The grandmother watched Geryon cross the porck and sit down between them
in a deck chair
without interrupting her sentence - "this idea that your lungs will explode
if you can't reach the surface -
lungs don't explode they collapse without oxygen I have it from Virginia Woolf
who once spoke to me at a party not of course
about drowning of which she had no idea yet - have I told you this story before?
I remember the sky behind her was purple she
came towards me saying 'Why are you alone in this huge blank garden
like a piece of eletricity?' Eletricity?
maybe she said cakes and tea true we were drinking gin it was long past
teatime but she was a highly original woman
I was praying God let it have been cakes and tea I'll tell her my anecdote
of Buenos Aires those Argentines
so crazy for tea every day at five the little cups but she drifted away the little
translucent cups like bones you know
in Buenos Aires I had a small dog but I see by your face I am wandering."
Geryon jumped. "No ma'am", he yelled
as the deck chair gouged him. "Gift from Freud but that is another story."
"Yes ma'am?"
"He drowned not Freud the dog and Fred made a joke it was not a funny joke
having to do with incomplete transference I cannot
recall the German wording the German weather however I remember exactly."
"What was the weather ma'am?"
"Cold and moonlit." "You met with Freud at night?" "Only in summer."
(...)
Anne Carson, XVIII. She, in "Autobiography of Red"
On October 21 2006
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