Session 08: Waltz for Venus
For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.
“Waltz for Venus: An Elegy”
Spores drift from green islands, gray eyes with ash —
he gets a cigar burn blessing right in the third eye
where for some, before, was a cross if not this
Wednesday then the next or the next or the last.
When one walks past a row of columns
one begins with six, splices to one, slides
back to six, columns being, then, two
kinds of circle — holding shape, enacting it.
Don’t tense up. He’ll still die,
drop the plant he’s holding, catch the bullet.
Fluid like water. Don’t die! Don’t die!
And still he will die leaving tinny music
some full flowers, some money to mend you.
Why hasn’t he come to see me?
You reach for the fact of a watery face.
He’s dead. I see. I never saw him—
and the sky will go on blinding some and not
others, healing with the same hand that harms.
No one knows why what hangs over the world
makes it worth living in or opens you like a music box.
“Ode to the Two Men Having Sex in ‘Waltz for Venus’”
One of you hung carefully your jacket over the bed
after entering the room — relaxing, neatly, as if by habit,
into nakedness. When she came in, gun out,
someone lost money or love. If Venus doesn’t have Grindr
I like to think this was one part of each day you could be,
more or less, yourselves, glowing together in that galactic room.
She sticks the gun in your mouth; you try to say you can’t
breathe. Like the guy you’re with hasn’t heard that before.
If the yellow sky hasn’t blinded you yet and you’ve kept that man
in bed all this time, years I hope, you can breathe with anything
down your throat, honey. We’ve both sucked dick. I know you
know what you’re doing, not even jumping when she came in.
I hope you both grew old together after this, after finally
spending the rest of that afternoon together, eating dinner,
holding hands as you walk the edge of one of the floating islands
that made it possible to live there on that planet built
for just such a series of moments, named so much for you —
air plant in my window now, may Venus be kinder than here.
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