A homeliness within

A year already here at Cowichan Bay, I have been thinking about the idea of home, what it feels like. Being home is the moment when the thresholds and the surrenders synchronize the moment of porous, swelling resonance, coincide in the release the yielding, the surrendering, the ex-static, the rapturous that ruptures the boundaries of predictable, definable plot, plotline. Today, it is good to be this, it is the right way to be in this world, filled with love that is reciprocated without rules or predetermined qualifications of investment and return. The feeling of being home in the sensuality of vital contact of my body with the time passing, with the physicality of duration, filled with rapture of life, already includes all the love that can be given, that can be received. This is the moment I would call home, the shifting of the familiar to a slightly strange yet inevitably known posture, the filling of a shape, a new position, new moment, new rhythm, new attentiveness and concentration of energy in the body. The idea of uncanny homeliness that is canny…a homeliness within. Perhaps that is where a personhood ululates (body and world), not in what it looks like, but in a manner of engagement.

I close my eyes and pull the invisible thread through the very centre of me, to catch onto a word that sits, wordlessly, in the heart of my desire. A home.

It is beyond what I know, yet I know it.

So let’s speak of touch that is irretrievable, that ignites the inner storms, the severing of limbs, the tearing of skin, I say, let loose the private guillotine that bites off the heads of all the bodies that I contain. The resplendent rounding, a spherical surrender into sur-rounding scape, an insupportable inflection seeps from the walls like moist liquid around an old wound.

My ruin is overgrown, sparkling with crimson poppies.

And without hesitation, this is my home, my house, where I am at.

Inevitable.

No matter where I am on your map, his map, their map.

There is no map.

There is no road.

Your hands know what to do.

You have the key.

Stay.

See how much I can harden, become solid, marmoreal, with veins of ancient Apollo. Yes, why should I say Venus? She is modest, she poses without saying anything, the way they like it here, the hollow eyes sparkling frantic over the absent centre. But not Apollo, not David. They have muscles, not just smooth skin and taut breasts, their torsos ripple with flesh, solidified.

And I want to bring my inner force to lay firmly, risen against skin, to show a woman is flesh. She has a shape underneath, different from the smooth white acquiescing softness of the feminine which is offered, shown to the gaze of many. This woman’s flesh tones the skin, not with the gaze of language, but with its substance, with the filling of me that I contain in a shape of a woman, finally at home.