I Live With You Read Free

light our lamp and go inside. Right away she takes out a huge book.
    “We can’t bring
that!”
    “I just want to show you some pictures. There are lots like this here, but this book is the best.
    The book is so big she has to put it on a special stand. She opens it and there they are—in gold leaf, or looks like it, a golden woman and a golden man. Naked. The woman is handing the man grapes or dates, and he reaches, not for them, but towards her breast. It’s as lewd as we always said their drawings are. But the green of the trees is as beautiful as the gold, so is the blue of the sky, as though green and blue could be as valuable as gold. The landscape is more like my world than like hers. It’s a picture you could fall right into—and would want to except for the naked couple. If I were there I’d hurry away behind the trees in the foreground.
    She turns the page and the next is even worse than the first. It’s as if you’re standing on a higher hill than before, in the shadow of pine trees, looking down. This time the couple is farther away, but you can see the golden man has his hand on the woman’s golden breast now, and the grapes or dates are on the ground, forgotten.
    Why is she showing me this? And she looks so young and innocent? She isn’t. Art has ruined her. She knows everything already. Probably more than I do. No wonder they want me to destroy the library.
    I don’t want her to turn to the next page. Nor the next and the next. I can imagine what they’ll be. And why look when we can do?
    I grab her and throw her down … on the make believe octopus. I drop on top of her. Kiss her—hard.
    At first she’s too shocked to react. She doesn’t seem to know what’s happening, but then she struggles. She bites my lip. I pull back and she yells, first a wordless shout and then, “No! Help!” If she keeps on making a racket, whatever other librarians are left here will come. I cover her mouth with my hand. She bites my hand this time and knees me. I’m the one should be yelling No.
    “I’ll let you go if you don’t shout.”
    “You’re an animal.”
    “It’s you, are an animal. How could you show me those pictures? And why? If not for….” But we don’t have words for that—not ones you can say to women.
    “I wanted you to see something beautiful. I thought if you saw them you might not want to burn them.”
    “I want to burn them all the more. Are all the books like this? Full of nakedness and corruption?”
    “Let me read something to you. Let me find the book—the one I’d choose if I could have one of my own.
    She goes straight to a small, hand-sized book. She holds it close to the lamp and begins to read, translating as she goes. Even in my own language I don’t understand it at all.
    Last to leave and first to come
.
A guessing game of death or life
.
Leaves of summer, leaves of spring
.
We fall but in our own ways
.
Neither like streams nor leaves
.
    Perhaps the meaning is lost in translation. I say, “Poetry lies as much as pictures do.”
    “We think it’s more true than truth.”
    “There can’t be such a thing?”
    Even so… even after the bad pictures and the meaningless poetry… even so I still like her. And she… even after I threw her down and almost raped her. She still likes me. I can see it on her face.
    I say, “I like you. In spite of the pictures. But I don’t suppose you can like me.”
    “I don’t know what to think.”
    “I don’t either but I like you anyway. But I don’t even know your name.”
    “Yawn,” she says.
    “What!”
    “My name is Yawn.”
    That’s an ugly word in our language. I can hardly make myself say it. I wonder what my name means in hers.
    “I’m Gabb.”
    “Bless water.”
    Should I have said the same after she said her name? Why bless? And by what crippled god?
    “Let me read you this other poem.”
    Joy is in the view from above

As houses seen by eagles

As after storms or in them
,
Seen as if you are the