Humiliated, this single swan, the love story of Tracey Emin and she explains it is perhaps her greatest work and I am sitting in my large living room, alone on a Saturday morning, all pretty much straightened and clean, but without a mate for life to share my books, the reams of papers I’ve collected in all of the colors and types of pens, fresh carrots and day-old salmon, those secrets kept.
She, Tracey, explains how this, Mann’s black swan\
her forever works, that she will love forever and ever and ever, (and just reading these words strung in a pearled line causes me to cry),
the longing. A woman, of fifty, constantly being humiliated for one reason or another, in love with the young man’s wrist, Dominque, the Italian from Esalen and how it traced my body, coming from the warmth of a fisherman’s sweater, me lying in the constellation of dying, searching bodies that day in the yurt, not gingerbread-man like the others, but fetal on my figure art of one weeks’ time, a corpse of dreams, my ninth hour prayer answered when of all the people it was this beautifully clear man who picked up a green marker to trace my body on the butcher paper.
That is the reason she gives for this white brick, a grave marker to lie across one’s heart, as if to silence the chambers of accordion, the way one used to sing and breathe in polka fashion, her man’s hands pressing into the small of her back as he chisels her into a mirror pond swan, a work of art in skin tones living.
There is a danger in steeping in grief, being in a constant dialogue with self, I swim circles around that place where he used to be, my double.
My belly swells and I too thought I was making another life, my body tricking me with this feeling of one last smack, but all those eggs are duds, punk-lit or not, they are fireworks that never redden a darkened sky, just silence, night after night of deafening silence, the sloughing of skin and all of those middle-aged women I saw one afternoon buying iced tea (two lumps) and French fries at the Dairy Maid, yesterday’s junk food is today’s health.
