Nude Dancer with Aulos by Arnold Genthe. Original from The Rijksmuseum.
From the point of view of love, look at this: a bank of purple irises, petals hanging like narrow tongues, the chipped tooth of a lover after tripping in the garden, the blood that rushes between the teeth like a tidal wave. See the red spreading. See it bloom at the buccal corners, slicking the gums and painting the grasses. Green panic. Thorny, endless vulnerability. A honeysuckle vine has buckled at the root. There is the sense that something cool and metallic is rubbing against something tender. I forget, for a moment, all the words for invasion and collision. All the words for violence. I think of sirens. Emergency. I think of melting when I mean to think of falling. The sun is like butter. I reach out to stroke the bed of her hair. I’m seeking out some hidden thing, some idea of softness, downy as the wing of a bird.
I was in Paris, that bruisy glow through the windows, that smell of yeast and smoke. Dry sunlight. Cold, hard roads that seemed to rise as you walked upon them, slap back with the impact of your stepping. Everything seemed alive in that way. The trees that had malted. The silent, verdant river with wars and pleasures on its back – that river that becomes a weeping eye – a witness to everything. My body dragged. My body was an old and young clock, fixed together this way. Rusted, stalling, but young, yes, in its years. The woman I was there with had the word cacheé inscribed on one thigh, trouveé inscribed on the back of the other. I rubbed my lips over the architecture of the letters, those clean, reaching, whiplashed curves. I bit down lightly on the o and the u of the ink. The word which means found.
I’ve been exposed. I’ve been discovered. Unearthed.
Memory. Morning light staggered upon bare skin like a floodlight where my body crouched. I conjugated verbs in my head that spoke of desire. Je veux. Tu veux. On veut. I snatched at words, wanting to turn to gold, wanting to translate each ordinary thing, each incendiary thing, into something alive: season, breath, or viscera. Now distance. Now another country between us. Now she’s standing in the wings. Now she’s spinning. Iris. We met on the last day of summer. Rain fell in great fat drops that steamed when it hit the streets. There was a thickness to the wind; it was as if, through the rain and the stirring of it, the dead skin of the city had lifted and had fallen away, been washed into the streams.
The scene glistened. Toujours, le ciel brillait – and still the sky was shining down –
I said: I want to know the world in every tongue. She said: I want my lipstick on the inside of
your thighs. I want to paint them with my mouth.
All red.
We’ve spent so long wrapped up in the night-time, penumbrous bars and bedrooms, that we go out into the sun in the summer and have thoughts of vampirism, skin sizzling, scuttling, going up in smoke. A lemon sun that burns like that juice to a wound. We went to gardens to creep about mosses and lichen and stoned pathways. We went to gardens to hide, to touch knees and thighs and hips. Ducking in and out of green, hedges that flanked us. Where birds’ wings flapped wildly and fledglings leapt from trees. Where, sometimes, peacocks stalked the grasses. Clouds like wishbones. Threading ourselves together. Biting into plums in the afternoon. Nearby, through the leaves, a stranger talked of a far-off hurricane. My hand on her thigh. This want is a transplanted feeling, an excess, it is something sharp and wide and magnetic. It suctions me to her. Her face curled out of a passion vine. Mouths that feel wounded. Bruised for the feeling. And then, later, black shine of water and velvet and hair. Earrings of light in the distance. Silhouettes of monuments. And the landscape feels like a person enfolding you, like a person who is lifting you up. You chew on your words and you
let them run out.
Going home.
Wet fingers go snuffing out all the candles in the house.
(What happens when the flame comes too close? A spark, a spark, a little pain.)
Teach me intimacy, said the soil to the seed, newly dropped. The earth opens up, it churns and encloses. Some hush/some soft exposure/some dirt(y) metaphor. A thousand tiny deaths followed by a thousand germinations. My dress dropped down from its hook in the night, its plummeting sound like a breath.
(Diary of an Undressing #2)
Maybe I’m not being truthful, maybe I’m not telling the truth. Maybe I’m dressing up
feelings in hot colour, coaxing beauty into a landscape, into a dream where it doesn’t belong.
It makes me want to begin again. Erase everything. What I mean is: imagine setting this page
on fire. The blackened edges. The curling light. The pleasure of watching the flame sway.
The appetite of its burning. The presence and the absence of things.
There is something tender in this. Something that I am trying to approach with words.
Feel this. How my longing runs contrapuntal to my sorrow. A twin scale, a movement that my fingers play. One line overtakes the other. Becomes fervent, aggressive. Notes that smash together now like cheekbones or climb like a feeling, a suffering that constricts the throat. A feeling of surprise: to find that there is no heavy hand there, squeezing.
I douse myself in purple scents.
I hold the grief of L’s death in the fat of my liver.
I hold my longing in my solar plexus. And, there, against the curve of my spine.
Dear Iris,
How is the length of your body arranged now? Like a song. Your teeth stacked in your mouth like some instrument, which, if I were there, I would approach with my lips. We used to sit in my box of a car together. We used to inhale the same air. Now a whirlpool feeling. Seeking intimacy from other people, together you and I become an open book. How many mountains and hands between us, reaching end to end? How much raging water? How many African violets? How it cycles. How the distance sprawls out, spools like a fabric that you can almost touch. How steadfast these hands can hold. I’m in a bar in an in-between town. I let a stranger named Alaska bite my collarbone. I listen to my skin sing. Now music is playing. Now my arms make a tunnel for the night to crawl through. Now a little blood seeps through to my shoe, where my ankle caught a flying shard of glass. What would you say? That the future is a magic box. That the future is a box of tricks. That the future is a vanishing act. The future is our chests touching. Some kind of ecstasy. Blue sparks. I bend my body down low.
Desire becomes like holding a secret.
As lovers, we say to each other: suck the key from out of my mouth.
(Diary of an Undressing #41)
Out there, you are. Somewhere. I give you soft bread that you hold against the inside of your cheek. I give you the meat of me – I gave – in some square of time that is out of reach. And warmth is now purloined by all of this vacancy, hollowness. My head is one giant murmur. I coil like a spring in the season of autumn, I fold in half. I remember the smell of burning. I remember everything with the sharpness of the edges of a book. My torso swaying. My eyes, swaying along in the cup of their lids. I am rooted to the floor, all the world dripping off of me like sea water. Blue glass shattered in the kitchen. Blue glass and brush stroke of blood now at my knee. Those small knives that splinters make. My dumb and drowsy eyes. I was looking for something in the hardness of the floor, a safe landing. Certainty. A quiet answer. I have made these parts of me hurt. I have made my fists ache. It is night when the body curls down to the bed like a semi-colon. Night when it opens up like a question mark. My body disrupting the sheets, my body querying, pushing unanswered things right into the core of its darkness.
Dear Iris,
I am making myself so tired. I refuse to go to sleep now. As if sleeping might cause my body to exit the world. The fear that everything would shift, the fear of letting my breathing sink heavy, my mouth turn slack. It’s already 3 in the morning. Bad habits. Bent over like the moon. A horizon against the page. And I think what of lips, what of kissing. And I think what it would be to hover over you in the light, in a fog of mauve. The fluidity of a dream. Lips that become arrows. I miss you as I wash out my mouth. Some dream. Following the line of a life. My fingers are touching the paper. Arms outstretched. Heavy breasts. Some storm between the legs. And the head feels square. A creased map. A field of sweet things. Gripping and releasing. We had to move shoulder to shoulder through the same music, the same disarming compositions. Learning to be alive. The choreography of bodies. We lament. Strange colours. Sky like pearl and dish water.
Something is off-centre, now. I anticipate emergency. My temperature is a mess, as if I’m running a fever. It is the feeling of running straight into a pack of wolves. The feeling of running through an old-world mansion, a warehouse in ruins, ornate walls, silence. States of decay. I see you in my mind. I see you brave and rare and pink in the fabric of the world. Some kind of drunkenness. Leaves are lined with gold, they shimmer. The heart in its field, in endless combat. Purple plumage. Ink in water. The streets are derelict and beautiful. I walk and I walk.
Memory is a wound is a wolf with an open mouth.
In your dream, I stud myself with rosemary. I reek of herb. I’m trying to wrap a swamp in muslin, I’m trying to send it away. It bleeds through the fabric, it leaks. It’s all so much unfertilized longing, fertilized beds, a song of spirits, a mirage in the bowl of my womb. Tonight, the dead singers are crooning, translucent, on their axes. I sink into the loam of history and love, I foam at the heart. I – standing at the edge of fire – remember your taste for heat. I drag sun-warmed emblems through all the places of my birth. Flames dressing the head. I’m pushed off the rim into the pool of this flesh, this circumstance, this euphoria of memory. Now plush faces, all dripping, reeled in by my eyes. Surfaces smearing surfaces with skin signatures. My face streams, too. My wet hair reshapes itself. The same questions fly around and leak their poisons. What of death? What of horror? Waking up in melancholy, it’s like trying to hold all this dry, splintering wood in my arms. Fear memorizes the air, memorizes the dangers of the world. I cleave a space, a clear line of breath, a glowing rock dropped into a delicate hand. The things we carry. I’m in this borderland. I will have to hurry. I will have to bring my hands in from the window, where they are touching the night. Love.
I am nowhere near the end.
Reading Note:
Some of my beloved rereads and recommended reading: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde, Lote by Shola von Reinhold, Swallow the Air by Tara June Winch, Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Heaven by Emerson Whitney, and Nightworks by Christine Schutt.
