#1 Their transformations are always unexpected
You have come to me for chaste conversation, your hands steepled like a church. It is what women do after all, talk and pray.
Why has the skim of satin over your hips caused a salt tide in me? Your hands ripple the fabric like unplumbed depths. What is it you want to tell me? You chatter of the brief ripples on the surface of the water, a feather, a piece of driftwood, the starry sky peppering the lake. You ask me what I see in the depths.
#2 Their form holds no more truth than formlessness
It is all driftwood and feathers. It is all stars, the bright flash of something that has already happened. In a dream, I’m a tea chest, camphor wood, adrift, timbers split and warped against a rusted iron lock.
Did you say you were drowning? It was your arms holding me up from the waves and your arms thrusting me under again.
Did you say I was drowning? Let me show you how long I can be without air.
#3 Their formlessness is no more stable than form
What is it we know of these dreams? Driftwood? Feathers? Or what it is to be a star, caught in gossamer thread, kept from glutting her lust on the earth. We could burn through these binds or sleep, wrapped and wanting nothing. Silkworms, too, know this dissolving forms wings. You ask me what dreams are made of—in your reckoning they are weaved from gossamer and diaphanous silk.
I hear you moan against my fingers, ask if we will be ocean or stardust tomorrow.
#4 Their fortunes are not easily captured
What is this tomorrow? I will close my eyes against it. I will take your fortune teller’s bauble in my mouth, against my palate, crush it, or swallow it whole. Let there be nothing but uncertainty: what is lip or tooth or tongue, what rib or hip or thigh might shake; what storm might our breath hold without lightening—
#5 Their ecstasies ripple like fabric on skin
You, the gentle, steepled one. You laugh at my violence. And you slip away into the water showing me how easy it is—we entwine like eels, sinuous as water, shed our skin, deny any barrier, submit ourselves to lick and grasp and bite. We don’t need air, we have lip and tooth and tongue. Only lick, only grasp, only bite.
#6 Their returnings are another ecstatic release
We might ease ourselves back slowly, relishing stages of moonlight, cloud, gun smoke, mud. We might condense all we have been, to what we were.
Here is your hand on my hip.
Here is your skin, here is mine.
