to dance
writing yesterday, and my Queen demands to do as she wishes rather than as I had planned. Writing, always surprising.
Excerpt:
Your receiving line, fair maiden? He asks.
Yes, she cries, regaling the heavens with her peals of laughter, for is this not the best kind of receiving, the root of receiving, the meaning of receiving--- the Kabbalah? He raises his arm, and with it come the drums, and the drummers, encircling them, ensnaring them, picking up on their heartbeats from which they devise their next rhythm. It is a syncopated one, and meant for their ears only.
Her sternum rises and falls in anticipation of the dance to come. He pauses and waits. Gatekeepers are the most patient onlookers to the moment of transition. The putting on of coats, the taking off of habits.
When she settles, she sets to the dance with great fervor. And the faster she moves the faster her heartbeat the faster the drums and the slower he goes so that there are two timbres, the one deep and resonant, slow to build and the other frenetically crescendoing until it must needs retract or the dancer will shatter into a million pieces. And yet, there is purpose. The delirium of the dance, its prophetic frenzy, takes the Queen’s heart and cracks it open to its fullest capacity, sending shivers down her spine. In her fancy, and with the purple green eyes shut to her partner, she is imagining he will circle around her and watch her for her beauty with the timbrels.
She starts turning, signifying the turning of the spheres, thinking of how he must be looking at her, her tiny waist and corseted front, and she lets slip the shawl ever so slightly so that he can see the nape of her neck and her tendrils in the moonlight, as the sun has fully set. But when she takes a moment to glance at him, to calculate his response to her swirls and swooshes, she sees that he is not looking at all, rather is swaying his hips and closing his eyes and answering to a different call than her own, an inner call perhaps, a call of smell and taste and the sap rising within himself as he feels the music pulsing in the inside of his wrists, his breast, for doesn’t he know that a man too can have sensations of pleasure in the heaving of his chest from the inflow of warm night air, and thus it is that he does not notice, that the tables turn, that it is she looking at him, and not the other way around.
She stamps her feet louder, sighing once and then again after surprising herself, then takes Rachel’s waist and the two circle round each other, two timbrels raised high, curls bouncing as they circle faster and faster, and were they mortal they would have known the feeling of the breaking of sweat, the flush rising, the scent of perfume meeting with skin. Rachel’s hands are slender and her skin so soft, yet Maya senses so much sameness in Rachel’s known-ness, and so much mystery in Papa Legba that she wishes she were not herself but the air circulating around him.
She feels her energy waning, remembering the prophecy that once Sabbath Queen, the generating forces commence their withdrawal once the sweetness of the Sabbath lingers as but a memory, and she realizes that she must stake her claim now or forever wonder what it would have been like. So she releases her fingers from Rachel’s, traces her palm into the air, gathers the strength of her skirts into a swirling mass of cloud and rain so furiously spinning that the angels wonder what has become of her, and whether the expenditure of such energy will render her return nigh to impossible—have they not compensated for her inexperiences enough to last ten Sabbaths? But she like a top straying off course and then slowing down to a tipsy stop, she brings herself to Papa Legba’s domain, laying herself down at his feet. He picks her up as would a child pluck a flower, sets her aright and slides his hand into her waistband, palms a timbrel and places it upon his head like a crown. Then he draws her close, eyes closed, the tension of differences increasing the magnetism between them.
His loin against her belly, his chest against her cheek, his hands beneath her buttocks and without a hint of shame or embarrassment he enfolds her. And not just her body, but the part of herself that as Sabbath Queen opens itself up as does a flower to the sun, and as she has not yet learned to relay the awesome power of her sublime presence to her minions and not retain it within herself, the power of a million souls is but one within them. She and Papa Legba, unlikely candidates for communion, their joining an unintended blind spot in the spheroids of heaven. The friction of difference- of the novel and unknown- a more penetrating arousal than any of skin or bone, of force or spasm, threaded through the needle of innocent desire to meet the Other and knotted through imagining alone.
Excerpt:
Your receiving line, fair maiden? He asks.
Yes, she cries, regaling the heavens with her peals of laughter, for is this not the best kind of receiving, the root of receiving, the meaning of receiving--- the Kabbalah? He raises his arm, and with it come the drums, and the drummers, encircling them, ensnaring them, picking up on their heartbeats from which they devise their next rhythm. It is a syncopated one, and meant for their ears only.
Her sternum rises and falls in anticipation of the dance to come. He pauses and waits. Gatekeepers are the most patient onlookers to the moment of transition. The putting on of coats, the taking off of habits.
When she settles, she sets to the dance with great fervor. And the faster she moves the faster her heartbeat the faster the drums and the slower he goes so that there are two timbres, the one deep and resonant, slow to build and the other frenetically crescendoing until it must needs retract or the dancer will shatter into a million pieces. And yet, there is purpose. The delirium of the dance, its prophetic frenzy, takes the Queen’s heart and cracks it open to its fullest capacity, sending shivers down her spine. In her fancy, and with the purple green eyes shut to her partner, she is imagining he will circle around her and watch her for her beauty with the timbrels.
She starts turning, signifying the turning of the spheres, thinking of how he must be looking at her, her tiny waist and corseted front, and she lets slip the shawl ever so slightly so that he can see the nape of her neck and her tendrils in the moonlight, as the sun has fully set. But when she takes a moment to glance at him, to calculate his response to her swirls and swooshes, she sees that he is not looking at all, rather is swaying his hips and closing his eyes and answering to a different call than her own, an inner call perhaps, a call of smell and taste and the sap rising within himself as he feels the music pulsing in the inside of his wrists, his breast, for doesn’t he know that a man too can have sensations of pleasure in the heaving of his chest from the inflow of warm night air, and thus it is that he does not notice, that the tables turn, that it is she looking at him, and not the other way around.
She stamps her feet louder, sighing once and then again after surprising herself, then takes Rachel’s waist and the two circle round each other, two timbrels raised high, curls bouncing as they circle faster and faster, and were they mortal they would have known the feeling of the breaking of sweat, the flush rising, the scent of perfume meeting with skin. Rachel’s hands are slender and her skin so soft, yet Maya senses so much sameness in Rachel’s known-ness, and so much mystery in Papa Legba that she wishes she were not herself but the air circulating around him.
She feels her energy waning, remembering the prophecy that once Sabbath Queen, the generating forces commence their withdrawal once the sweetness of the Sabbath lingers as but a memory, and she realizes that she must stake her claim now or forever wonder what it would have been like. So she releases her fingers from Rachel’s, traces her palm into the air, gathers the strength of her skirts into a swirling mass of cloud and rain so furiously spinning that the angels wonder what has become of her, and whether the expenditure of such energy will render her return nigh to impossible—have they not compensated for her inexperiences enough to last ten Sabbaths? But she like a top straying off course and then slowing down to a tipsy stop, she brings herself to Papa Legba’s domain, laying herself down at his feet. He picks her up as would a child pluck a flower, sets her aright and slides his hand into her waistband, palms a timbrel and places it upon his head like a crown. Then he draws her close, eyes closed, the tension of differences increasing the magnetism between them.
His loin against her belly, his chest against her cheek, his hands beneath her buttocks and without a hint of shame or embarrassment he enfolds her. And not just her body, but the part of herself that as Sabbath Queen opens itself up as does a flower to the sun, and as she has not yet learned to relay the awesome power of her sublime presence to her minions and not retain it within herself, the power of a million souls is but one within them. She and Papa Legba, unlikely candidates for communion, their joining an unintended blind spot in the spheroids of heaven. The friction of difference- of the novel and unknown- a more penetrating arousal than any of skin or bone, of force or spasm, threaded through the needle of innocent desire to meet the Other and knotted through imagining alone.
posted by lori at 5:28 AM
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