Open wide. Open your lips, your
tongue, your chest, your arms, your fists, your legs. Open, I say, this winter
morning.
What concerns a
present moment, a lived time that passes into a swelling of sensual experience,
the multiplicities of tongues of the world that taste the moment, is an
unaccountable succession of expressions, foldings and re-foldings of the
sensate, the sensible, the sensual. Enraptured in transition, in translation.
Not the kind of linguistic, structural transcription, the meaning transference
from one language to another in the more familiar, literary manner, but a
translation of experience, of the self as it loosens in the tremors, the shifts
between the familiar and the strange. In surrendering to the lived moment, the
established, familiar identity and position of the self in the world becomes
destabilized, rendered uncertain.
In translating
the experience of alterity that shows itself as I negotiate the cultural scope
of the prescribed, of the predictable, of the familiar, I surrender to the
language of the elements: the earth, fire, air. The water. But also to more
nuanced affects of the experience – the smells, sounds, textures, voices, licks
of heat, shivers of cold, colors, saturations, carnal imperatives. I surrender
to those sensual provocations that accent the noise, the odors, atmosphere,
gestures, glimpses that awaken the body in a flash, respond to un-red, faded
flesh, unseen, slowly transmits slower and slower, fading patches of naked
skin.
The tongue and
language linger at a threshold, holding the moment, caught, for an instant, in
slow motion, slow enough in the time passing to invite the rest of me, my whole
body, my unsettled rhythms, to surrender. This is freshly fleshed language,
another tongue, a sensual alterity. Just past the spoken or written word, just
slightly out of the frame, faintly behind the senses, yet underlying them all,
lingering, behind the scene. An alert interpretation.
But a single tongue makes no
vital contact, except with one’s mouth.
So, let’s say it’s language I’m
talking to, I’m conversing with, I am touching. Let’s say it is language I am
trying to seduce, to make love to, to be in vital contact with. Let’s say it is
language, he who fulfills my being-ness, each moment a child of duration. I
dissolve into a threshold, wait to re-assemble, while at the same time I am the
time passing. There is no moment of threshold without that notion. A threshold
does not hold, does not wait.
Delicate
yearning ornates through my hollow binding, in one moment of flowering, the
softest moment of yielding to your skin, I gather the scent in my arms like
demurred flowers left thrown in the path you took through me. The tracks you
left behind, scars that bind me in place, and only faint echo lingers at my
fingertips, on my tongue, the moist corner darkened now in shadows of my
desire. My tongue, the keykeeper, staggers under the weight of unopened doors,
of keys that unlock what needs to yield, what wants to be taken.
Separated by a
whisper, our tongues taste the turquoise air, uninterrupted.
I feel the bones too close to the
skin in which I shelter, bulging in strange protrusions, stretching, craving
words, promiscuous, seductive. Sentences rolling from my tongue, my pelvis,
reverberations of expectation and aftermath, I am a whore that lusts after more
words: deciduous, embark, rejuvenated, crepuscule, endow, slippery, intuitive,
generous, tumultuous, aberrant, yield, torment, precise, gripping, manifold.
Immersed at a threshold between
the familiar and the uncertain, the strange, the unfamiliar, away form the
comfort zone of the known, we attempt to understand one another through
language, but even as we speak the same language, it is not the same tongue
that seeks the shape of its mouth.
It turns up silently, dishing up
shiny words, moistening the page in unspoken fever of the moment that yields
its mouth to the spoon of silver tarnished with history taken by surprise.
Abducted by the sense, I tire of holding still, of abating breath, I shed the
debris of history, un-framed, woven into the light of the moment, I stop
counting time, I dance the gathering of veils. I surrender to the heat of the
moment, into its unraveling duration, I release the furrowed brow, the
unverifiable pieces of tender disclosure, of this ravaging discomfort of
revelation. My limbs disengage the tenacious hold on the familiar, and the
world tastes of me, the salty coincidences of my skin melting in the heat of
this disheveled moment. The wonderland of unmistakable lust in expectation of
the astonishing and inevitable combination of surrender and vital contact.
Yet it is this moment precisely
when the translation becomes irrelevant, the connection, the vital contact
escapes, swells, dissolves beyond the boundaries of duality. In this moment,
this passing, fleeting duration of contact, the translation between two or more
entities is both possible and irrelevant. Not a translation, but literally,
making sense. But it is only a moment (and I am the time passing), it cannot be
sustained, the spaces fill up with density of discursive noise of (I am
astonished at the solidity) discarnate misreadings.
Suspended on
tender hooks, the world’s tongue curls around my limbs and I cannot be rid of
it. A consummated riddle of the sensual fusion, falling into fear, without
fear, fear doesn’t make sense, only sense rests against the walls that softly
peel the colors away from my face. My face wears the last garment, the world’s
tongue upon my skin.
You cannot
separate a woman from her text.
you very well, expressively and boldly interconnect your selves into a single organism, where language, linguistics and body become a single cell. it does seem to me a woman's gift to this world - that the world and the person are not separate, and that is where true being really is, and how deep life is. Thanks for sharing of your selves in one.
ReplyDeleteFrom Toivo
Thank you, Toivo for your meaningful response. To me, writing hinges on those visceral engagements that connect us to the world. Those are furtive experiences, but available to us if we are willing to open. I am glad you enjoyed my post.
ReplyDelete