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too tired. It seemed a long drive.
     
     

XVIII. SHE
     
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    Back at the house all was dark except a light from the porch.
     
     
    ————
     
    Herakles went to see. Geryon had a thought to call home and ran upstairs.
     
    You can use the phone in my mother’s room
     
    top of the stairs turn left,
Herakles called after him. But when he reached the room
     
    he stopped in a night gone suddenly solid.
     
    Who am I? He had been here before in the dark on the stairs with his hands out
     
    groping for a switch—he hit it
     
    and the room sprang towards him like an angry surf with its unappeasable debris
     
    of woman liquors, he saw a slip
     
    a dropped magazine combs baby powder a stack of phone books a bowl of pearls
     
    a teacup with water in it himself
     
    in the mirror cruel as a slash of lipstick—he banged the light off.
     
    He had been here before, dangling
     
    inside the word
she
like a trinket at a belt. Spokes of red rang across his eyelids
     
    in the blackness.
     
    As he made his way downstairs again Geryon could hear the grandmother’s voice.
     
    She was sitting in the porch swing
     
    with her hands in her lap and her small feet dangling. A rectangle of light
     
    fell across the porch from the kitchen door
     
    and just touched her hem. Herakles lay flat on his back on top of the picnic table,
     
    both arms across his face.
     
    The grandmother watched Geryon cross the porch and sit down between them
     
    in a deck chair
     
    without interrupting her sentence
—this idea that your lungs will explode
     
    if you can’t reach the surface
—
     
    lungs don’t explode they collapse without oxygen I have it from Virginia Woolf
     
    who once spoke to me at a party not of course
     
    about drowning of which she had no idea yet—have I told you this story before?
     
    I remember the sky behind her was purple she
     
    came towards me saying
Why are you alone in this huge blank garden
     
    like a piece of electricity?
Electricity?
     
    Maybe she said cakes and tea true we were drinking gin it was long past
     
    teatime but she was a highly original woman
     
    I was praying God let it have been cakes and tea I’ll tell her my anecdote
     
    of Buenos Aires those Argentines
     
    so crazy for tea every day at five the little cups but she drifted away the little
     
    translucent cups like bones you know
     
    in Buenos Aires I had a small dog but I see by your face I am wandering.
     
    Geryon jumped.
No ma’am,
he yelled
     
    as the deck chair gouged him.
Gift from Freud but that is another story.
     
    Yes ma’am?
     
    He drowned not Freud the dog and Freud made a joke it was not a funny joke
     
    having to do with incomplete transference I cannot
     
    recall the German wording the German weather however I remember exactly.
     
    What was the weather ma’am?
     
    Cold and moonlit. You met with Freud at night? Only in summer.
     
    The phone rang and Herakles
     
    fell off the table then ran to answer it. July moonshadows stood motionless
     
    on the grass. Geryon watched
     
    a presence soaking out of them.
What was I saying? Oh yes Freud reality
     
    is a web Freud used to say
—
     
    Ma’am? Yes. Can I ask you something? Certainly. I want to know about Lava Man.
     
    Ah.
     
    I want to know what he was like. He was badly burned. But he didn’t die?
     
    Not in the jail.
     
    And then what? And then he joined with Barnum you know the Barnum Circus
     
    he toured United States made a lot
     
    of money I saw the show in Mexico City when I was twelve. Was it a good show?
     
    Pretty good Freud would have called it
     
    unconscious metaphysics but at twelve I was not cynical I had a good time.
     
    So what did he do? He gave out
     
    souvenir pumice and showed where the incandescence had brushed him
     
    I am a drop of gold he would say
     
    I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things
—
     
    Look! he would prick his thumb
     
    and