Judith E. Johnson

THE ICE LIZARD: CARNIVALE!

Lady, why are you crying? i asked her.

I want you to change me, she croaked.

Are you mine then? i asked. Did i make you?

I’m the world’s, she answered. You woke me…

...

It was carnival time / she had on miles

of ice white satin with sequins, cut a fine figure.

A little nightmusic, please, she croaked, winking

a jeweled eyelid. It gets too quiet down here

under the house. I don’t get much action.

Break out your blue kazoo. Well, i played

"Mam-mee, how I love ya;" she didn’t move. I played

a slow, smoky blues; she hated it. I obliged

with a boogie. The sharp sail on her back sprang up

then

she shook it

WHOOPEE!

The ice light of her eyes flickered, reflected

from the stone walls. The ice smoke of her breath shivered

the stone air. The ice knives of her

spine cracked the stone room. Her three hundred carat

squarecut vulgar diamonds flashed

over acres of scales. She sashayed. She shook.

She swelled. She filled out. She filled the room.

Her green / smoking muscled flanks flung me

backwards through the door / flattened me

against the basement wall. With the roar of a glacier cracking

seedlings of itself through the stiffened lips

of a bay into frozen seas, she heaved her broad tail

out of the ice age caves, and rampaged up

through the cellar ceiling

the house

through windows doors chimneys.

Each green glass shard

each brass hinge and handle

joined itself to her scales, moved with her like a rhine-stoned

showpiece, grew to her shimmy / each city

window sent its teeth to her strut

each house shook / rained itself onto her scales

bricks / tiles, magnetized / snapped to her skin

and stomped / stomped / WHOOPEE TIME!

In the whole city

not one structure remained that was not / all over her. Naturally,

everything fell with her when she

with no warning at all

tumbled down in a heap

to rest.

When i woke under her body, that pile of rubble

into which i had snuggled as it coiled its domed, sheltering temple

over me, i looked up at her vaulted neck,

her proud, distant face

towering / older than memory / eyelids closed.

From their edges / through gullied cheeks / i saw the glacier

tears coil down:

I dance with the world, she said.

Make me a new one.

I want you to make me a world where I can whoop it up a little

without knocking the house down.

I want life to shimmy and stomp with me and not fall apart.

Make me something exuberant, something generous, something

big enough to hold me, something that will

curl and arch as my neck arches,

that will shelter multitudes,

that will rise up as my head rises up

to raise you with it,

that will love you

as my eyes and my tongue and my miles of jeweled

skin love and love. I want to live in a world fit for love.

Make me a world, she said. Make me a world.

.....

Copyright 1992 by Judith E. Johnson

Readings and performances with masks, music , dragon, and gorilla suit by arrangement with author