Saint Nobody

Fluidity

31 Fluidity Be patient with me as my body feels the clutch and pinch of yours as if for the first time. I mean the first time, half my life ago, when my young lover refused to wait for younger me. Impatient, he took his share. A curtain tore in my heart, the beginning of our end. First love, first blood, first feeling pain, then liking it. I grew to love the pain, then I grew out of him. My body was a vessel, a temple, and all that rot. Now it is a field well plowed, and the harvest sleeps next door while we try the tillage again. Has it ever been easy for me, the tumble down that rabbit hole where mind takes body, body takes heart, blood takes all, the winner? I almost can’t remember, for your whiskers start and prick. And now the pain’s so sharp I wonder if I’ve bled. We hear a cry. My breasts leak milk, love spilling on the sheets, but not staining. Oh for true fluidity, motion without jerking, breathing open-mouthed without a catch, a scratch, a cough in the throat. Be patient, I ask, help me flow with you—your voice and hands—dispel sounds from above—below— our son’s bedroom. So much of it is in the brain, I’m told, our largest sexual organ. “Sex” sounds so base, but I’ve used “love” too many times already here, and it’s just a euphemism for this bawdy function— an arm here, a leg there, parts tangling, probing, flinching, everything too slippery or too parched to work smoothly. If I expect too much, my dear, forgive me, for after all this fracas is the prickling force, the source. ...