Free Exit Wound by Michael Marano

EXIT WOUND
    Though I know he hates when I watch, each time my eyes drink the glory of him taking the gun to his mouth, it excites me.
    What contrition do I owe, if he does not fully close the door of his studio?
    And though it excites me, I also know the betraying thump of remorse to see him committed to anything I am not. His attention on anything but me severs me from myself. The weakness in my knees and the glutted emptiness in my loins are born of famishment for his gaze.
    The shot that flies apart his head flies apart my heart. In that smothered limbo, my consciousness burns as would shadow-eternal flesh in sunlight.
    I share the music of the red fog in which he drifts, his song of self-killing from which he wakes to begin his Art while the thunder-shot he limits through his Will lingers in my hearing.
    Thus, do I share his Art. But never completely. His creativity defines my heart. It is right that I shatter for it, that I die during his hymns to immortality. I leave him to his Work as he replaces the gun, still oozing blue smoke, on the table before him; I leave him to the earth-marrow pigments and scabbing shade-forms he has freed.
    And afterward—when he has done taking brushes crafted of his own hair and bone to what the shot has thrown of him to the canvas, and he has patched the hole made by the bullet as it passed through the canvas—it excites me again to come to him . . . to taste gun-oil on his lips and powder-burns upon the back of his scalp and to kiss coagulate paint from his fingers.
    Often, in the studio perfumed with cordite, I reach down to find his Art has given him release. I touch him as if
I
have brought him release, and claim by proxy the beauty of his Work. To taste the gun-oil distilled through his blood into the saltiness of his release is to hold his Art upon my tongue and take it as Communion.
    It is only after I have given him chilled fruit and mineral water to cleanse his palate that I dare a horizon-glance upon his work.
My
cleansing comes as I am burned by the russet fires the bullet has cast as layered vistas upon his canvas . . . the passions of his vision risen as living earth-tones. At times, the exaltation from the back of his head strikes the canvas so that, with a few brush strokes, working this day’s red vibrancies into yesterday’s browns, he creates swirling infinities that breathe, as if the paint still pulsed as it had within his body.
    November dawn-fire dims to ash all that surrounds it. The white of the studio walls becomes smoke-stained and sad beside his Art. It scalds my eyes.
    “It’s beautiful,” I
wish
to say. I’d not let my words sully air through which his vision has just warmly flown, even if I
could
free my voice from the snare my throat becomes before his Work. The canvas is a well of genius. Images overlap, at varying depths.
    Here—painted upon rough fabric and branded on the rough gel of my eyes, the oft-painted “house of the suicide” is reclaimed by my lover’s light. Here—the folded, churning clouds of trite dusks over the Hudson are infused with the depths of desert canyon walls. Here—a lily in a French garden flowers the colors of both new and old scars, floating on a pond of iron-rust. Here—cloaked like the images hidden within the game-pictures children love, a Starry Night made a Starry Twilight . . . with a firmament of red-crystal flecks.
    Life and movement, granted by his drying blood. The blood of his life, the blood of his Art. The skill of his long and nimble fingers summon Truth. Patches of singed hair give texture to waving copper grass. Bits of teeth are pebbled to fairy-land cobblestones. A spiral of skin dances with cochlea. A scrap of eye, the pupil and iris, had, on one marvelous day, struck the far right corner of the canvas, so that the painting became a kind of mirror (so he explained), able to gaze back at the viewer with the reflexivity unique to great Art.
    While he sips mineral water and tastes fruit, I