Hanna Schygulla, to you
Don’t talk so much, he says, out of synch and overdubbed, to your creamy eyes then, as he lifts the fabric of your short and white halterneck dress with his gaze, it won’t make me jealous if they sweeten your name.
Sweeten my day, Hanna. Libeling.
Throw your placid fronted face towards me again,
or else, a long take of your back will do.
For this I will keep milk in a cold place for you
and heat it in a small saucer when you can’t sleep.
(Let me tell you how I’ll dig a hole in the ground, to fill with ice chips, herbs, and sweet williams. I will tend to my frozen garden blooming with bottles as diligently as your servant.)
This white that you wore today, Hanna? It’s deeply unfair.
But even in the presence of your bronzed and perfected arm and…. I’m still stuck on your eyes and I must mention now that I find their blue bottomless and oozing, with honey laden lids neatly cloaking a laser beam stare, and I, your admirer at the end of the bar in a tweed three piece, who writes in a small notepad about the depth of your looks and the one time they graced me in 1971-- in a burst of ecstasy then I ordered another cuba libre and squeezed the lime in myself, letting the juice run down my fingers into an invisible wound from earlier, when I picked a small shard of glass out of my ring finger, in the already boozy late afternoon light. If you remember it was Summer and the overhead fans were on.
For you, Hanna, I’ll sweep the spotted floor with a blue handled broom when your lover throws a rocks glass over his shoulder to make a point of not wanting you.
I’m specifically interested in the fat second between when the glass is tossed and the crash, between the removal of the foreign object and the bleeding. You and I can never get far enough away from bleeding to talk about it. If I squint my eyes and suck my cheeks in while staring into a shard I think I see a little you in me.
****
It was a bad lip reading when you told me that you loved me and I missed completely the words let’s go listen to some music so I was caught off guard when you dropped the needle on “Times Have Changed” by Spooky Tooth, although I knew they had.