You Cannot Separate a Woman from her Text

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.