You will remember that last meeting before her death.
That November Jamaica had lost its petulance. The season of sorrel,
rum and bloody poinsettias was gathering strength; and in that hiatus,
in a house buried by trees in the hills overlooking the sea,
people whispered and laughed and she was there,
her skin warm with chocolate smoothness, her hair
alarmingly white, these heavy coils of plaits falling about her.
You talked of memory, but it was as if you were both forgetting
the wounds, the skin covered with fire ants, the long chasm
between you, the decades of sowing silence. So, you asked
for two secrets, and she promised a third after your two.
I hated you for a long time, she said. And I painted you as a fat
monstrosity full of pomposity and bile. This stopped
three years ago when I met your son; he said you sent your love.
The second: For thirty days I have fasted on lime juice
and scotch bonnet peppers so I could look beautiful.
I bought this dress for you. See my back, the muscles—look.
You told her that for years you have dreamed of a winter week,
snowed in, and both of you walking through the halls of your home
of glass; the room heated to 80 degrees—both of you naked,
you painting canvasses. Was I yours? She asked. No, you said.
We were both as we are and beautiful, and my paintings
were of our new bodies blue and wrinkled and graceful
and guiltless before the fall. I have never hated you.
I have only feared you. You smiled, both of you. Then she said,
I am dying. And she did. It was only a month.
You heard in January, on a slate gray day, the ground covered
with three-day old snow. You painted her back as if her hands
were bound at the wrist, and you wept with the memory
of what was lost. There is always, at the fore of all beauty,
a false art, that last of our bodies, as if we were ever anything
other than these pimpled, sweaty, smelly pieces of meat, waiting
valiantly for the moment we give up and start to rot.