‘The body’

‘The body’, no longer ‘her body’, there in a diorama almost set precisely in an alcove filled out with flowers, two roseate globe lamps and two red-shaded tapers, become as a whole array, a fetish upon which the emotions and memories about the woman are channelled, but try as I might, looking upon the face, not quite right, slightly off, as though molded and coated with the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust, I could not picture a moving living memory, the body had taken them from me, it was not until later, in bed, that I could ‘see’ her laughing, with her partial plate and coffee-rasped throat, because what was there and the way it sat in the room was the hinge point in the forgetting process, where life becomes the caricature of ‘the sleeping body’, of ‘her sleeping body’, and it is at that point you are shaken to abandon your attachment to embodied memories, by depositing them onto the fetish doll, and the final time you turn your back, after all the receptional and conversational dismissals, you leave those desires and applications, and equations of ‘her’ upon ‘it’ and you take her away as a completely memorial construction.


Critical Response:

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