Greta Garbo. Greta Garbo, the syllables are a bit slippery, breathlessly so. She exhales--communicating with smoke signals in billowing cursive ink. She has the courage of one elegantly applied gesture: "Greta Garbo" spoken in a whisper as she pushes her middle finger over my lips. Unclear is if she has just seen Ms. Garbo and is has been startled by the specter or if she suddenly thought of the answer to Final Jeopardy or the morning crosswords....
or perhaps she has sunken into pure delusion: "I am Greta Garbo." she says and her pull on me is like the riptide, the agressive flirtations of the lunatic moon. Her finger with its chipped glittered polish has branded me, commanded me. Clear is me now, suddenly and out of obligation, locked in my head. I am stuck inside my bed in my suite in my hotel. I mouth the words, "I am Greta Garbo. And I want to be alone."
This is the thistle of relationship--the stickiness and the nettles; the two fold strategy of luring first with the sweet milk of the stem and then burying into fur or fabric with tender hooks to be taken to far horizons. There is the intoxication, drunk on sugar and sustenance, the hummingbird begins to weave and warble...there is the waste (of love). And when the memories have made an itchy place under the saddle, this stallion will rise and buck and run, until the seeds of that despair have found a new country.
