The History of Our Love
If you were a skeleton,
and I were a skeleton,
we would weave our bones together
in a death’s head embrace.
I’d be able to get closer to you
than I’ve ever been,
my clavicle bumping up
against your acromion.
Every one of the twenty-seven
little bones of my hand
would grab your iliac crest
with equal enthusiasm.
The chalky scrape
of kneecap against femur,
the click and rattle
of your metacarpals dragging over
my fibula and tibia,
would drive us to ever-increasing
ecstasies of excitement.
When you drew your phalanges
over my ribs, I’d sound
like a horny, bony xylophone.
We’d grind, scrape, click and rattle
right through the night,
and the day, and the night,
wearing ourselves and each other away
until nothing was left
but a happy, exhausted heap
of calcium carbonate,
like a pile of powdered Tums
or crushed Rolaids,
ready to be pressed
into a stick of chalk
for a child to write on the sidewalk
the history of our love.
By Jan Steckel. First appeared in Redwood Coast Review, October 2007.
http://www.jansteckel.com
The art piece is one inspired first by how moved I was by a photo in National Geographic, of a couple who died at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius, in Pompeii. I worked from the moment of my emotions, which reflected a mixture of tragedy at the timing; a moment of love between the two, and a profound feeling of the coincidence surrounding the utmost bliss possible for two humans in love, combining with horrific death in the face of unstoppable forces of nature.
At the moment that I saw the photo in old archives of mine, I was working on a series of Adam and Eve inspired artworks. the collaged painting of Adam and Eve is from an old master, Jan Van Eyck, I believe. I felt in the moments that I was creating the mixed media artwork that all tragic death of humans (and I think it can be said that all death is at some level tragic), is a good metaphor for the casting out from Paradise of Adam and Eve.