[from Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx © 1997, p53-54:]
---The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced across, a faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from the rest of the room. In the closet hung two pairs of jeans crease-ironed and folded neatly over wire hangers, on the floor a pair of worn packer boots he thought he remembered. At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with suspension from a nail, hung a shirt. He lifted it of the nail. Jacks's old shirt from Brokeback days. The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis's nose hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn't held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.
---The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack's sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.
[Aside from this being a highly evocative description, what interests me is how Annie Proulx (a woman) imagines a man mourning, remembering, and missing another man; and i think she captures it just right. How do you recall those you love who aren't currently with you?
I suggest reading Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain (which is very short) and also her The Shipping News (which won the Pulitzer Prize) if you ever get a chance; good musings on love.
Good day, Gentle Reader . . . .]
I imagine this reaction to lost love as completely universal . . . I have done it myself . . . I can fully picture it from men who have lost fathers and children and women they've loved, as well as lovers or friends of any gender. There is nothing more powerful than the remembrance of a scent, or the warmth of skin and hair. It is what makes us think of the other as alive and why death is so hard to face thinking we will lose this evidence of love. Beautiful passage, beloved.
ReplyDelete