David-Baptiste Chirot



The Voice of the Diva
(Among Pomegranate Seeds & Refugee Gardens)

(for Gwen & Kelly)

                It is at the end of a long hallway, where in the mornings one never knows what country this is. For so few people there is a lot of noise. Incessant tvs on, battered boom boxes jerry-rigged and spray painted, badly recorded bootleg tapes of live shows, continual babbling and squabbling.
                The small back porch looks over yard gardens of Vietnamese farmers supplying restaurants from hard scrabble soil. Illegal Irish housepainters and day laborers setting out, picked up by bosses in small trucks, shouting with resonant voices. Some school girls go by, trailing a scent that quickly decays in the gaze of men.
                A large rock outcropping shatters a crumbling concrete wall alongside pot holed roads slumping towards the river. Fragments of forgotten regimes of renovations scatter obscure chipped numberings, letterings, strewing the gutters indistinguishable from streets. Crashings and disintegrations of harshly abused vehicles, riddled with rust and salt scars, dotting the roads as far as exhaust occluded eyes can see.
                A morning flinging open chaos’ possibilities. An opera awaiting the entrance of the Diva and the soaring rhythms of her arias.
                Speeds of disintegrations in the sedimenting alluvial mind mixing with flowing particles of metal, plastic, glass, concrete, brick, tar, dirt, grass, cucumber plants . . . drifting smells of gasoline, marijuana, enamel house paints, breakfasts cooking, sexual aftermaths . . . sun rays strong arming through fracturing window panes . . . so much happening everything slows, drifts, pools in potholes of time rust-red and golden, shimmering with light . . .
                Staring at the slow push of a syringe, blood coiling into the liquid, curling like smoke. The sudden hit and relax and a quiet flowing over muffled sounds. Higher and higher the balloon mind ascends, buoyed by a swaying body. The swarming of things is floating. And jolting suddenly, focusing on the facing door. Cracked paint making jagged-edged lines running along the jointures of boards. The doorknob worn to a dulled bronze pushing into space, giving birth to an obstinancy prodding the will.
                Drinking instant coffee, working with airplane glue. Chemical smells scattering in the slanting rays on torn pages. A forgotten cigarette singeing fingers, a careless move and something is falling, slowly, to the floor. A face looking up with eyes screaming to escape a photographed past, to jump out among the living from the hell of a soul captured on film, trapped in a paper scrap.
                Down the hall and through all the rooms along its length, the morning light bringing quiet. The vampires beginning their daytime sleep. In the wafting peace, one sound remaining. A strange knock knock knocking from a room across the way. Rhythmically repeating, machinelike, without any variation.
                Finally moving and grasping it, the door knob stopping its obstinant prodding. Turning it, opening the door, moving across the litter strewn hall. Behind the facing door the knocking continuing, now hearing in it a metallic sound.
                The door is unlocked, and inside at first seeing only heaps of dirty clothing, torn posters, a hash pipe, plastic syringes, broken bottles, spilled wax from candle stumps in old wine bottles. A heavy curtain dimming the mess, making one far corner hard to see. Going closer—the rhythmic knocking getting louder and louder. A young woman’s head, black haired, white faced, bumping repeatedly on the whirring shuddering hulk of an ancient dark-green rust-encrusted industrial fan recently hauled up from a demolished garage.
                Black hair dyed blacker, white face paler than white, eyes staring, a crushed but parted pout in the small red lips. Small teeth gleaming in red, like pomegranate seeds. A masked being keeping time in another dimension, head banging in a metal concert.
                The Diva, arriving on stage at the opera, made up and staring into the dimness where somewhere an audience is waiting. The incessant rhythmic accompaniment is hiding her stolen voice. She keeps staring into the dimness, waiting for a sign of its presence among shadows.
                In the other room, the screaming eyes in a photograph are calling out for a release from hell. The tortured soul trapped in the captured image is calling for a hiding place from camera eyes, for a body beyond the frame in a scrap on a floor in a room of scraps of haunted restless images.
                Carefully picking up the scrap, carrying it across the hall, into the room. Laying it on a pillow alongside the Diva’s splayed body. Just as gently, moving the Diva’s banging head off the rhythmically shuddering hulk, placing it beside the face on the pillow.
                Now the screaming eyes find a voice in the arias of the Diva’s parted, painted lips and find peace in the reflections in the Diva’s staring eyes.
                Quietly closing the door, going down the hall past rooms in which the living dead are lying, descending the stairs, down the steep porch steps, out into the street, walking with the others on the way to work.
                The voice of the Diva is singing among the living, among the dead, among the living-dead. The voice of the Diva is soaring from among pomegranate seeds and refugee’s gardens.

 
 
 
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