SONNET By Pat Teeling ly woman he had seen this morning who had been kicked out of her apartment and stood by her objects, looking from side to side as if she might be able to find a cranny in the sidewalk, or at the foot of a building, to stuff some of it. It wasn’t people who demanded a home, a space, it was the objects. His books were the most insistent characters and he their careArt by Fay Jones e r / * - “ He says it's all one big bed anyway, the whole fucking world. Sooner or later all the lines of communication cross. The girl wanders back and forth between rooms. What does it matter? The body’s sweetbread: the open grave of the soul. I lie down in yours with others. Freud says every fuck is a foursome. I love you. But the bodies are piling up. And the girl wanders back and forth between rooms. There’s a dead planet out there for each of us. That’s why we fill the earth with rooms and lie down together. That’s why I lie down in you with others.” S tan ley P lum ly There were clothes all over what had been his study. Thrown on the sofa were drab piles of socks, ragged hills of towels and one huge mound of sheets. His pictures were gone, back now in his own place. To think that where he had spent so much time was now her laundry room. This was a kind of forlorn luxury. He had used the space so well. He remembered with satisfaction his small table and chair where he wrote in his journal, lanthe would hang about at the door and ask him what was in it, but he made her swear never to read it. When they had fought and she had thrown the silverware at him (she had learned not to waste the dishes), he would go to his room and write all the things she said in the little yellow leather book, which a previous lover had given him. These he had known would help him when the end came, as, of course, it did; and now he thumbed through those past nights like a catechism. He was packing the rest of his books. He had found the key, left for him and the children under the silver dish on top of the clay flower pot, and let himself in the back way. It wasn’t easy to move his great burden of learning. Arnold didn’t know how the world that owned things, actual houses and cars, furniture and radios, managed to stay alive; how it was the streets weren’t more trashy than they already were. He understood the lone- taker. If he had no books he imagined he would ride the rails or sleep in bus depots or public libraries. This room, this laundry room, was covered from floor to ceiling with his books: books on art, philosophy and sex. She had moved the two he had on sex. He could tell because he had noted how they lay on their shelf toward the bottom of the red case. Oh, he knew her well. She didn’t read them out of curiosity as to what the books were about but because he had owned them before, with others. It was her way of torturing herself, of thinking of him in those positions (the ones he had marked with a star) with others. She was a masochist. And a 12 Clinton St. Quarterly
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz