House of Bone

In the moment of arousal you lose ten pounds. Call this every girl's dream perhaps but this is not by design and carries no visible image of itself, is more a falling away of all intention, a peeling back to the strange estranged heart of you.

It is not something I have chosen to dwell within: we have only—as ever you may—passed quickly through the house of your orgasm, no cathedral this but a house of bone, skin stretched inadequate to its frame, reticent not sublime, no famous glow as if it swam from not toward the ravisher eye, would not be made satin but cleaved to the eaves of your face. And your unspeakable eyes wide as rainy jewels: how can I tell their vacancy, their ravishing colourlessness.

You are unproductive in desire, abject, denuded, scoured by arousal that sweeps the landscape barren and fallow and waiting for winter to lie across its skin. This is your wonder, that you strip yourself so of the bounty of your charms, your capital squandered, blasted all in one brief wonderful moment so much harsher than charm.

How can you have set forth from your North Shore girlhood with this in your heart? How have you slipped through the nets into this moment of truth, bypassed those throat-bared swooners, stepped rather into this bleaching light, this hunger, body thinned to the minimal ecstatic moment, a field of jutting corners peculiarly human as it reaches toward me to be baptised or put out by that which lies beyond and is present barely in your consummate eyes that put out such light!