Read Online Longing by J. D. Landis - Free Book Online

inside himself—and had succeeded in this!—she had been unable to do the same with him. But Jean Paul, though he was not a Schumann and as a human being was more god than man, had been able to communicate more to Robert than had his own sister. Robert had spoken to Jean Paul, and Jean Paul had spoken to Robert. Was this not the sacred benefaction of art? And was not art the highest calling to which a man might summon himself? But when the artist died? When one voice was shut off and the other left giving off its lonely cries? It was sad, of course, but it was also somehow just.
    Death was the greatest mystery of all. What better place to think about it than by a river? As in one of the mystical sixteenth-century landscapes by Albrecht Altdorfer, whose work Herr Richter had asked the Lyceum art classes to practice duplicating, its waters flowed like time, never to return. And on its banks a young man could dream in the sweet breeze blowing through the box elders with their fingery leaves and through the hairy sumac and Norway maples with the milky juice ejaculated from their leaf stems when he snapped them and the juice ran down his fingers to their very webs.
    Snipes chortled. Geese yawped in migratory diminuendo. Hawks cruised silently above the tree he leaned his head upon to hold the weight of all its poems. Detritus from the cold-killed meadowsweet lay scattered on the ground, its powers lost to make the drink his father read him of in Chaucer, save, a name that Robert joked belonged to wine because it was the only thing that to drown in was to be saved. He had picked toadflax in a field on his way to the river, because its yellow flowers still spent their color upon his skin and because he’d read that the plant could yield a salve that might cure the kind of rash his sister had.
    He closed his eyes and thought of lines to add to his poem about Liddy and the death of Jean Paul. Perhaps it could become an elegy, for Jean Paul himself and for the death of his love for Liddy Hempel, a way to conjoin sex and death, as they were said to meet as the “little death” in the climax of the very making of love itself, which he had yet to experience with anyone but himself, alas.
    The notion of the Philistine was a good one for such a poem, because it aroused a heroic image of the defense of fragile goodness against the brute and crushing force of ignorance. On the other hand, the word “dunderhead” was not sufficiently threnodic even when used to describe the enemy of art. And lines with four beats were really too short for an elegy, which needed the graceful elongation of the more extended line to represent both lamentation and testimonial.
    He fell asleep under the influence of such rhetorical retrospection and dreamed the dreams that wakefulness did not provide. Liddy loved him then. He heard her scream and wondered at the sound, if women cried out thus in pleasure. It frightened him—the strident passion of the sound itself, and the monstrous chasm between desire and experience—and excited him. He saw her dressed in white, a pretty dress, adhering to her skin so that her body was before him unadorned. Her hair was wet, and on her eyelids glistened drops of dew or sweat or something unknown put forth by women in their ardor. She seemed exhausted now, wholly spent, floating by before his eyes before he’d chanced to touch her. It was not fair. Her leaving him without…
    He opened his eyes. There, through the trees, he saw her, all in white, her dress so wet her skin showed through, her breasts, the sacred pyramid between her legs, her head thrown back so as she moved away from him, he saw her eyes, upside down, bounce open and look back at him from a maiden’s radiant countenance. She was a phantom floating through the forest, suspended between the fallen autumn leaves and the unforthcoming Saxon sky.
    Four men carried her. She seemed no burden, but they were downcast. He