Kevin Fitzgerald

The Piping

P used to sink…the sink…in the morning lime patina on metal under rafters. Toothpaste top dropped like roulette and singing pipes—hear them singing in the hollow silence—archipelago music. Only a funeral could stop the unearthly drone. Topics ranged from the refined and trenchant intellectual to the malicious person of importance, the chamber of loaded busts, caricatures who say, “I love my plastered shrine—blasted—leave me alone.” To the embassy they went in a pale yellow Renault, which P drove with feverish indifference. In drafty interiors he wore a red scarf and read in shabby chairs among equally shabby furniture. M walked in a billowy nightdress into the garden, into the orchid. Light seeped through the slats of the fence, catching her hair. Theirs became a mutual understanding. They need speak only scantily, as in Bresson. White smoke trailed slowly in a clear winter sky over an idle train station. P drifted into sleep as the fat cat in his lap stared with Buddhist eyes. Water spread level over M’s nude oblong body in a white tub warmed by blue mosaic tile. Under the water an invisible generator hummed a large calm marble hall. The smokehouse had many rooms. But then P wandered barefoot into a castle missing its roof. Peeling orange paint revealed gray. M was lost and P found this unbearable. He aimlessly opened empty closets and cupboards. In the evening he sat alone in the barren dining room staring through an open window and listening—hear the piping—archipelago music.

Suitcase

I plied the local grocer as a badger, listening to an invisible tenant at night. She added a score by humming listlessly. I sought the good among the lost, among men in suits who shifted their shoulders like slugs. She played her cards in the laundromat. I remember how we used to sit around the backroom cracking nuts with exhilaration, children after one another at dusk, walks through fire until…until we lost our reflections in a dark pool. No smoke, only leaves adrift in the wind. I wanted the world to pause and reverence a passing but the 'I' withstood all dissolution. Only in the mirror did we remain twins.

Parthenope

With mossy eyebrows I brooded over nuanced histories treating the defenestration of Prague and the conflagration of London. Decorated with scars, Orleans anchored himself across from me. Dispensing with pleasantries, he remarked, “You used to be legendary in these parts. You spawned critical standards for ideologues everywhere to dance. Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine.” ° The proprietor quickly filled his glass. I hazarded a roundabout response that alluded to the influence of lunar cycles. A febrile lady appeared. “O this languid pressing,” she uttered with supple neck. The piper held his breath; the fiddler trimmed his strings. Her cheek glowed like a fauvist peach. “She is Parthenope,” whispered Orleans, “the Siren whose song failed to shipwreck Odysseus.” She dove into Orleans' glass and drowned. “Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine,” repeated Orleans, which brought the proprietor to tears.

°I die of thirst near the fountain.