the obsession

Obsession

The Obsession

Robert Dana
FEVER

Heat licks the lips
their bone are fuses
of dry sparks

There is no name
they must guard
their mouths against

Their eyelids close
upon soreness
sleep deafens them

They do not see
moonlight slide
across cold metal

They see nothing
nights dissolve
into glasses of water

Days flicker
into the backs
of drawn shades

This is their kingdom
they are its black priests
and sick of it.

Neon sculpture by Lili Lakich

In a brief but smoky scene from The Big Combo , unusually provocative for its day, the respectable Susan (Jean Wallace) reveals why she can't find the will power to break off with her gangster lover, Mr. Brown (off screen).

Excerpt of poem from from The Fahrenheit Chronicles
by Suzanne Lummis

Li-Young Lee
from THE CITY IN WHICH I LOVE YOU

... A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body
the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

My tongue remembets your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil....

But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hull clogged, I continue laden, translated
by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain...

WOMEN TO DIE FOR AND
THE MEN WHO REALLY DO

Resigned to his fate, "The Swede" (Burt Lancaster in The Killers) hears his executioners approaching his door. It all started when he fell for this woman.

Maybe she was worth it.

Who is she?

Enter keyhole

GREAT LITERATURE

... One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moon light. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the locks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees -- he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her.
from The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

GREAT NOIR

Anna. We were married. About two years ago. It lasted seven months. A man eats an apple, gets a piece of the core stuck beween his teeth, you know? He tries to work it out with some cellophane off a cigarette pack. What happens? The cellophane gets stuck in there too. Anna. What was the use? I knew, one way or the other, somehow I'd wind up seeing her that night.

- Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross

Richard Garcia
ANGEL FACE

Looking into her eyes was like playing with matches
in a gas-filled room. You'd just as well
try making love to an angel.
Driving an ambulance, you see a lot. One afternoon
I retrieved a blonde's head from a culvert.
But nothing got me ready for Diane Tremayne.
Not even all those other Dianes and Dianas in my life,
so many I referred to them by number -- Diane #1
Diane #2, a Dina, a Dinah, a Deedee.
I see now they were practice, maybe warnings.
Diane Tremayne. She'd come toward you looking up
with those eyes so innocent, in her bathrobe
with the shoulder pads and tiny waist cinched tight,
and next thing you know you're bent over her while she's arched
backward above her husband's semiconscious body
in the back of your ambulance. You've turned off the radio,
and she's got the keys anyway. You don't tell her
that her face is doing this changing thing, changing
from one face to another, into the faces of all
the other Dianes you've known, like she really is
an angel, one of those dark ones
who can pull you down through the sheets
and you're falling through icy clouds.

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