An Opera With No Libretto

By GEORGE LOONEY

 

This rough bark’s gray, lit up, separated

from the dark by some distant lamp.

 

A single wren collapses into its own

admonishment of grays. A still life, this

 

study of the loss of color that accompanies

the diminishment of light. The visible,

 

fading, makes us long for color enough

to make it more than memory. It is

 

winter, yet two women embraced by this

tree an hour before, the light going,

 

defining desire. Definition’s no stand-in

for description. The women have left

 

one another with the memory of the warmth

of another body. Familiar.

 

No collapse of music could get close enough

to touch this. No wren could sing two notes

 

that could hold one another the way

those women embraced, fog an absolution,

 

the easy collapse of flesh against flesh

a slow psalm a solemn choir sings

 

while others swallow the host. Confession

is just the beginning. Desire is

 

no one note wonder but an opera

with no single libretto, signification

 

gone berserk, a throat’s dark hollow

resonant with the depths needed to bring

 

one note to the kind of life those women

lived so fully and so well beside

 

that bark so gray it could have been a column

of ash, almost the body of a woman.

 

 

George Looney‘s books include Monks Beginning to Waltz, A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness, Open Between Us, The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, Attendant Ghosts, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh, and the 2008 novella Hymn of Ash. 

[Click here to purchase your copy of Issue 07]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

An Opera With No Libretto

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.