By Saba Syed Razvi
When they found him beside the lake, the poet had already forgotten what speech was. They knew he was a poet instantly because no one else could have been so sad inside the eyes, and because he was dressed entirely in old black, and because he had brought the rain with him where the sun had greened and fruited the courtyards and lawns for months before. For the first time they could remember, it had rained instead of in the evenings or the nightscape, in the morning, even before the afternoon siesta. Though they were children, then, they understood the difference between a miracle and a curse.
They looked for a graveyard to send him to, where the quiet might serve his brooding, and because that is where they thought that sad men went to be alone, to their remembering of the ends of things, so that others could have beginnings. But, having so little to do with rain, they had no idea where to find an umbrella. And they didn’t want to chance coming across another lonely mute in the downpour on the way. They asked him his name and he said nothing. When they suggested Barnaby or Michael, his eyes looked like a woman’s and they could decide on nothing. Fearing to insult him, they called him instead simply “The Poet.”
And he had looked lost. So they took him by the hand and promised him tea. He did not refuse. Nor did he consent, but floated along behind their grasping fingers like a shadow man.
Their parents handled the shock of discovering a strange androgynous man sitting silently in the parlor rather differently.
Their mother, in a pearl-pink gown with a long train, curled up, looking like the inside of an abalone when she sat in the crook of the velvet chaise, smoking from a long stemmed cigarette holder in short, hesitant breaths, the length of the long sofa empty but for the ghost of once-lounging, bare legs. She looked surreptitiously from behind the smoke and, through her mauve lipstick, murmured,
“And in whose company do we take pleasure tonight, darlings? Alfred and Edith, is this your new playmate come to see us?”
“We found him,” said Edith, nearly bursting.
“And he hasn’t a voice, Mum, nor even a name!” added Alfred.
“Is that so, dear visitor?” And he said nothing, staring at his black-burgundy shoes while they told her of the purpling rain and their conferred title. So, she watched him, curiously behind her cigarettes, not hiding her interest.
He blinked, breathed, sighed once in a while and nothing more.
When her husband came home, late in the afternoon, they had not even moved, though hours had passed. She said, “Look, we have a guest, come and say—”
“I don’t have time for the children’s games just now, Sylvia, or imaginary friends. This rain tires me and I am going to my bed.” And it seemed he could not see him, at all, for he had never been a rude man, only a little brown of heart.
When nightfall came, the rain had not lessened, and the wind began howling like a werewolf’s anguish and the children had gone to bed. Sylvia filled a wineglass with cranberry juice and lime, placed a cup of coffee before the pale, young man, and watched. It was like staring at a haunted picture and she kept waiting for him to move, but he didn’t. When she fell asleep, folded over, hand and glass dangling over her knees, when she woke like that, neck stiff in the still raining, silvering dawn, he still had not moved.
Days went by and he had not moved. The children played cards in the room at his feet, read books out loud, and still, he did not speak. They began to wonder when he would go and if the rain would go with him. They began to catch his silent malaise like a fever, and only snapped at one another in brief exchanges.
One night, when the lightning would not cease and the thunder rattled the house, everything lit by the blue flashes and the gleams through the streaming rain, by the heady gale, they sat there in the parlor in this way. Sylvia’s husband thought them mad or ridiculous and he had gone away on a train. The children bored with unfulfilled curiosity, had taken all night and day to sleeping in their beds. She could not hold her thoughts and asked, “Who are you? From whence have you come? Where are your people? You poets are a cruel-hearted lot.”
Nothing.
So, she strode across the room, still in the pink gown and the pearls and having run out of cigarettes, holding instead a silver and lace fan. And with her blank hand, she yanked off his hat and screamed, as though perhaps he was simply almost deaf, “Answer me!”
And in her gesture, came by way of answer, long hair tumbling from beneath the hat, and a frantic expression upwards into the inquiring face.
“Oh! You’re a woman?”
And the silent figure mumbled solemnly, “Yes.”
“Why have you dressed like a man in mourning, then?”
“I had crept thus into my lover’s home,” she said, “upon his own request, because his ailing mother would not permit him to marry. He had dressed me as a man, himself, and kept me as a silent friend. He said, ‘never speak or she will know you.’ and I did not, but she knew.”
“How long did you remain that way? How remarkable! A gamine, after all. What a mystery you’re turning out to be! And, let me guess, you finally left after all of that and you’ve just forgotten how to speak until now!”
“No.” And then a long time passed.
“And would you like to go back?”
“There is nowhere left to go.”
Sylvia chewed on her bottom lip, loving the riddle of this, but too impatient to figure it out, she opened and closed her mouth in caught syllables, unsure of what to ask.
“She found me one day, bathing in the dawn, and screamed so loud she cursed my lover dead. I plucked her wishes from the air and begged her not to speak in anger, and she lamented all the hours of the long, thus-led years. He had no words to console her. Yet, he could not bear her weeping breath, and he cast me out instead, back into a nothing, like a spirit. I stopped speaking, then, because there was nothing left to say.”
Sylvia watched this strange woman in a man’s mourning suit until the candles burned away. And in the next flash of lightning, she was gone. The dawn was orange again and the rain had stopped. And there was a black hat, under the window; where it had fallen it still lay.
Saba Syed Razvi, PhD is the author of the Elgin Award-nominated collection In the Crocodile Gardens (Agape Editions) and the collection heliophobia (Finishing Line Press), which appeared on the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award ® for Superior Achievement in Poetry, as well as the chapbooks Limerence& Lux (Chax Press), Of the Divining and the Dead (Finishing Line Press), and Beside the Muezzin’s Call & Beyond the Harem’s Veil (Finishing Line Press). She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX, where in addition to working on scholarly research on interfaces between contemporary poetry and science and on gender & sexuality in speculative and horror literature and pop-culture, she is writing new poems and fiction.