ami
Leaves on the grass. Maples and oaks. A crackly composition lay before me, mixed with a misting of rain, signaling the end of summer and the beginning of everything else. I could state my thesis in a particular way, bore you with the usual hackneyed allusion to Greek letters that respectively resemble a house and a horseshoe, rough symbols meant to bookend and render concrete the abstraction that is often sublime, often wretched experience. I won't do that. Instead I offer you this: The beginning was Ami. The end was Ami.
On the seventeenth day of a certain September, she came bounding through -- a leafy virginal vision -- dismaying, delighting, and eventually destroying. Deftly defying my every attempt to confine her to the concrete sidewalk of my mind, she tramped straight through the grass, a fresh-legged, henna-haired, rough-hewn hunk of agate. Mine.
Her forehead was high and smooth. The hollows under her nearly-colorless eyes were densely freckled, and her lips always seemed wet, slightly parted; they issued forth nothing, save the occasional soft murmur or low-pitched growl. The commands I obeyed were uttered not with her mouth but were articulated carefully in mechanical gestures -- the turning of her head, the curve of her elbow, the surreptitious sideways glance. And she will always remain: Ami. Mine even now, she still peers from behind mailboxes and sheets of rain, or trudging over fresh-fallen snow, crunchy leaf blankets, and the meadows of my soul. Dear Ami.
Moving through the courtyard this afternoon, my wing-tipped toe lightly brushed a brittle yellow leaf, lifting it slightly. Then, as I passed, it returned to stillness. Dogs barked. And like bells -- Woof! the dogs, or the loud leaf awakened a lurking vision, reasserted an old memory, a bit of porcelain on this curio shelf. And today then, I must map the topology of this white figurine, something I will try (and fail) to do without pretentiousness or facile whimsy.
Girl drawn on graph paper, my sorrow, I'll always remember you like this: a thin long trail of graphite, arcing the surface of a precise blue grid, a childish notebook, cross-hatched with powder-blue ink, home to X's and Y's and various Cartesian citizens, and you.
I am fourteen, fifteen perhaps, when I first see this mathematical projection of our love. And of course I don't know it, but this scrawl will be the only important equation when I am twice as old as I am then. Michael, an older boy, draws on such a page, two broad arcs, approaching each other, attaining quickening, maddening proximity, and then, they almost touch, for a degree are parallel, and continue on, moving further away from each other....never knowing. And he matter-of-factly calls this a hyperbola. I feel old and foolish now: the language of mathematics has long since escaped me, and I don't even know if he was correct. Nomenclature and precision are the tools of poets and mathematicians, of which I am hardly either. The image though remains burned in my mind, branded, as bright and as clear as that day, years ago. As real as dogs barking, as bright as the fallen leaf. Perhaps in that place where men replace words and thoughts with clumsy symbols, maybe on billboards or the cover of a bestseller, or the big screen, my story will be summed up such: a yellow leaf resting upon a slightly crumpled sheet of graph paper. This is my tribute.
Where to begin? Perhaps this morning is as good a place as any. I read about the nearly-unknown modernist poet Mina Loy this morning, after coffee, after newspaper, before the mailbox, and before donning my appropriately snazzy suit and tie, and heading out into the appropriately fogged morning. This is perhaps the last time in this narrative that I will approach the events of this doomed affair with such precise chronology. What follows is mad recollection: a collection of tartan swatches, bumper stickers, and cruel, dramatic pastiche, a bungled mimeograph of events, places, and smells that have began to bleed purple, stain my fingers, and incense my senses, in no particular order.
It seems Ms. Loy, one evening in 1917, attended a costume ball, a pagan romp, with Marcel Duchamp. After the party favors had been broken, and all the pumpkins had long since dropped their peasant-girl facades, the pair returned to Duchamp's home, with three hangers-on. They talked into the early morning, and dined on scrambled eggs and Champagne before all five retired to Duchamp's bed, for what my sources report as a "chaste night." Oh shades of me! Many a chaste night was spent with my Ami. What difference does it make now? This is merely a good tale, an amusing anecdote to tell at other parties and pagan romps, I suppose. And my story is so much more. But I suppose I could go overboard with details and hyperbole. Hyperbola. What's the difference?
©1999 Ami is the property of Anthony Robinson. Please do not reproduce without the author's permission.
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