flesh and verse la vida nueva Alfred Arteaga   contents hair            voice         heart         eyes           ombligo               skin            lips             breasts               nipples                feet            vagina                 back           legs            hands                 motion                poema                            hair I lose myself in the black forest of Ada, un alma perdido en el bosque nocturnal, lost in the night woods of her black hair. Close, there, in her strands, there inside the night growth that is at once hers and her, there I am not so much beside as I am inside, not so much apart as a part, there sense her. Yet it is not black in her night woods, not true black, the color of absence. Hers is a color burnt on the dark side of the moon. Very near in tone but vital, not absent, present, even though it retains distance. There on the pillow beside her I withdraw from the hard morning light from the bay into that woods and night. I press my face to her, press my nose just below her left ear and behind it. I pull the black strands, the dark, fragrant vines about me; my eyes press so if as to perceive by touch. I descend into her dark night: my world, my air, my sight, my contact with everything beyond me; her dark woods, her night world, her night forest, intensely burnt on the moon. I am lost there. It is not really that I lose myself or that I lose her, but I withdraw from the morning light off the bay through my window with the shapes of clouds or mist or fog or none coming past the Golden Gate, and I draw myself into her, into her night woods and the scent of woman. I move in, merge in amid the forest hair of strand and branch and vine, and am enveloped so close that my sense of sight is realized by touch. I move through that night wood, apart from the light of day and the solitary world of my body, at moments without need for memory or image or the need to put anything into words. It is carnal, body with body, mine pressed inside hers. For hers is the hair of love. Hers is the body of love, the one body I love singularly as I do, driven by the impulse of man for woman but not repeatable, solitary, a love uniquely for her one body, her hair of night woods. This is my love for this woman, amid her, woven among the strands of that only body that she is, moving through the rare and fragrant vines. And I find myself in love there, in the physical contradiction, I both lose and find myself there, in love. It is a contradiction that makes no sense and yet that is purely sensory: that I am simultaneously there lost and found makes no sense there in the senses. It is perhaps another impossibility, the impossible phenomenon of there, that makes possible, or is the location of, the coincidence of contradiction, there in love. There in the night forest of Ada, enmeshed in the night flora, the commingling of faint fragrance, her perfume, Chanel Crystalle, her shampoo, and the oil that is her musk, present in the black of the dark side of the moon a color the color of chocolate burned. For there is the impossibility that sex prescribes the male and the female of our species, to be there so close to another so as to make one. And yet the sensory for me is not merely the biologic, for I do not speak now of the joining of gametes in the dance of reproduction that makes humans, but instead I consider love, the dance that makes us human. That is like sex, love strikes me as that impossible place of merging where one loses oneself and finds oneself with another who does similarly. For me that place is inside the night woods, withdrawn into the black side of the moon in the light of day. Love and its attendant impossibilities are, of course, the domain of much poetry. I set about to catalog human emotions in a collection of poems, Silvas Humanas. I ended the poem “Amor” with the plain definition:                            amor es una palabra de dos sílabas está hablado en dos voces en seguida en planos invisibles pero claras, móvil y con alta temperatura.                            amor is one word of two syllables, spoken en two voices together on invisible but bright planes, mobile and at high temperature. As I think about my beloved’s black hair and about my emergence into her, I am drawn to reflect upon the imagining of poets and the fact of my experience. One poem that comes to mind is John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” It is a valediction from lover to beloved, which defines the nature of their love such that it precludes sorrow upon their separation. It is perhaps best know for its conceit, the extended metaphor of lovers as the two feet of a drawing compass: while one foot may venture away, the two, nevertheless, remain attached at the top, so that one lover recalls the other and “makes me end, where I begun.” This metaphor makes possible the imagining of the separation of two lovers as an expansion of one being rather than as a breach between two, each one absent from the other. But what strikes me most of the poem is its attempt to figure the nature of love. The lover and his compass mate are two souls which are one because theirs is a love so refined that they cannot know what it is. A love divine, or perhaps more musically, a love supreme. While a recourse to the ineffable and divine seems to me a way to envision the impossible weaving of one’s self into another, it nevertheless seems an imaginary love that I would never want to realize. So refined is their love that they “care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.” They can avoid the sorrow of absence because their love is so highly exalted, far above a type that sounds remarkably like mine: Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. I am writing this right now, not on the pillow, covering myself with my love’s dark hair; she is not here. I miss her. Mine is a love with body, I know that when she is gone I am sad. And should she die, I will mourn. Her hair is a dark blessing, a real forest of night air and strands of my beloved. If I could press myself into her now, I would. I do not want a love that cares little at absence. Mine is a passionate affair with one woman’s body, with one real woman’s body, unlike any other ever. When we part, she is not with me. Like this moment now, I long for that night forest, ache to be so close I am lost and I am found amid the dark fragrant strands in the shadow of the moon midday.                voice As I consider my love’s voice, I recall the sonnet of another English poet, lines that make me consider what it is I sense in voice and absence that so contrasts with Donne’s love divine. For voice seems to me, in essence, more elusive than is hair, as if voice were fabricated from the elements of absence. The sounds she makes, the air she expels from her lungs into shapes and rhythm and into words I understand, seem to touch me at slight remove, across the table, or at great remove, on the phone from the US or on tape from last summer. In hearing her voice, I sense the physical push on my eardrums, perhaps the touch on my face as well, from the vibrations she has shaped and sent in motion to me. At the same time that her voice does its work, it does so at some requisite distance from me. Keats took up the problem of love’s absence in a manner that he conceives as somewhat between mine and that of Donne. Keats’s sonnet of the lover’s absence has been called “To—,” and leaves the name of the poem’s object forever absent. It is one of three poems recalling one woman briefly seen in Vauxhall. It begins, Time’s sea hath been five years at its slow ebb, Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand, Since I was tangled in thy beauty’s web and snared by the ungloving of thy hand.  Half a decade of grief we find. It is a sentiment quite different from Donne’s indifference to “eyes, lips, and hands to miss.” I understand Keats. His sentiment makes sense, at least this far. It makes sense because I miss Ada sometimes even when she is beside me. I know this makes no sense, and the thought of five years apart from her could well fill my days with sorrow. And yet this is precisely what bothers me about Keats’s poem: I understand the sense of grief brought on by absence, but the extreme reaction based on such little contact makes no sense to me. Five years of grief for the moment it took to unglove a hand? How much time could have transpired in one woman’s act of taking off her glove? A minute? Mere seconds? And I wonder, how did she expose a hand that could so profoundly effect the consummate Romantic poet? For five years the memory of that ungloving so colored the sensibilities of the poet that he could not perceive the world without her absence filling his world with sorrow. The sonnet ends,                   Thou does eclipse Every delight with sweet remembering, And grief unto my darling joys dost bring. In a way the extremes of the poem, the misplaced intensity of attachment and the severity of the grief, make me recall Donne’s sublunary lovers. Perhaps the love in Keats’s poem is so much of sense that it cannot admit absence. Perhaps the poem articulates the mourning of absent lovers whose love is unrefined. But neither vision, Keats or Donne’s, speaks to me of love. Keats’s is obsessive, and Donne’s is spiritual, images I could admit analogous at times to love, but not as love itself as I understand it. My love does partake of the sense of Ada, and I miss her when she is gone, but I do not construe the experience as either obsession or religion. Yet there are two elements of Keats’s poem that I find particularly illuminating with regard to my own sense of my love, her hair, her voice. The poem recalls the memory of love by evoking the image of the ungloved hand and turns to the sense of sound. Upon regarding a budding flower, My fond ear, in fancy at thy lips, and hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour Its sweets in the wrong sense. The longing to hear the lover’s sound is perhaps so strong so as to cause the visual perception of an object by the sense of sound. The sensory confusion makes sense to me as when I press my eyes so as to feel her hair. There are other elements at work in another line, “Since I was tangled in thy beauty’s web,” a line I find significant in several ways. The metaphor of the web, which signals submission and loss, even if a bit obsessive, does make its point. Then that the web is beauty’s, is significant, for in this way the sonnet marks the aesthetic as one domain of love. This I believe is true. I know my love is beautiful and that my love for her was first due, at least in part, to her physical beauty. But the aspect of Keats’s line that most directly affects me is the verb, tangled. In my love’s hair, and even more in her voice, I lose and find myself entangled. In her hair the entangling is literal. In her voice I entwine, my voice with hers, perhaps less physically than I do in her dark forest but just as firmly woven in the strands of the give and take. I know that beside my love, sharing one pillow, I allow myself to enter the night forest of her hair, penetrating the nocturnal growth and am entangled by it. I as much allow myself to withdraw from the light of morning in order to draw myself into her lunar blackness, as I allow myself to become strands amid her strands in our night fabric. I embrace love’s beauty in a confused sense, like sight played out in the realm of touch. But her voice is more ephemeral, less tangible than the strands of night. It is played out across time. She talks. She talks again. At times she breathes, sighs, moans. Her voice is her sound shaped into music, speech, or emotion. At one moment she hums, barely evoking lyrics; at another, her words break off into laughter, ripe, rich, infectious; at yet another time, she talks words, begins and ends, makes a point. Her voice starts and stops, shapes her breath into communicative acts, into meaning and silence. I like it best when she calls my name. And this because she doesn’t need to, because the fact of voice is entwined with absence. Just as her speaking my name is bounded by the absence of any other name she could call, each bit of voice she articulates is bounded by some choice over some absence. At any moment her voice chooses a presence or is itself silence. That absence is, in the end, nothing like the five years described by Keats, but is, perhaps, something like that described by Neruda at the end of the fifteenth poem of his Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada: Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente. Distante y dolorosa como si hubieras muerto. Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan. Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto. I like you quiet because it is like you are gone. Distant and painful as if you had died. Just a word, a smile, and I am happy, happy that it may not be true. I love her vowels, the shapes that Chicago and Los Angeles have made of her words, the ease to laughter, and the way she forges words to challenge. I love the sounds she makes that are hers alone and that I have come unavoidably and by desire to associate with her body, with the unique body that she is. I grow impatient if I miss the rhythms she breathes into a sentence, if the pace, the tenacity, the joy, is denied presence. Her voice is the meaning of her. Its sound means she is in the world and that therefore I have a claim to peace. The shape and the beat of words with which she fills my air are reason enough. Yet even more important to me than this, than the physical facts of her sound, is the tangle that her voice makes with absence. For voice does not have to be, and it is always so imbricated in the matter of choice. That she speaks my name delights me, for could she not speak of and to someone else? Could she not otherwise speak the name of another love? Could she not, by another choice, not speak at all? Each articulation of breath she expels into language is a fabric woven from the strands of choice and silence. My love’s voice is the presence she makes from the real and from the potential of any absence. And more still: her voice, in speaking to me, engages me: we entangle each other in the tapestry we make weaving meaning. She speaks and pauses and chooses and is silent, and so do I. I say in poetry that “amor / es una palabra de dos sílabas / está hablado en dos voces en seguida.” We entangle each other in voice, lose and find our selves and find each other, in the breathing shaped into word and the choice and silence that are the stuff of absence.                heart My love has two hearts. One red, one black. One is the hidden flesh, that I hear when my ear is on her breast or feel when my chest is pressed against her back and my arms enfold her. It is her rhythm, red I imagine, that has marked her existence since she herself was in her mother’s womb and that will mark her life pace until it, her breath, and she stop. The other heart I can see when she stands before me wet after bathing or urges me onto her, lying back, she opens space between her thighs for me. It is the black nest of hair that springs from the point where her legs join and that fans up and out toward her hips by just the breadth of her hand, a slight dip at the extent of the center line on top, the cleft of the heart. The red heart I never see remains a mystery. It is so much the unseen machine of her living, that responds physically to sex, to sleep, to music, to her morning sprint up Strawberry Canyon, that I believe it also the machine of her emotion as well. Her heart is the color of blood. Her passions are the color of blood. Her heart is the center of my concerns for her life and for her passions, an essential preoccupation of mine; it is always beyond sight, yet rhythmic and perhaps certain. In that mystery there is magic, the delight of absence from my sight, my perception, my knowing, and it is the very rhythm that is she. I think this about her heart because I believe in the first place, in its prominence physically. Each chain of heartbeats, each acceleration, deceleration, each change in intensity and each steady rhythm is the sound and pulse of her body. And that each beat occurs makes her at that moment, imparts motion and sensibility, and does so punctuated by silence. The real beat I hear when my ear is pressed close or I feel when the skin of my hand or chest is pressed flat against her wrist or back or breast in a vital expression defying “lo que no sea cierto.” Because of this, the flesh machine that beats red and pumps life through her body making her be in the present, this heart of hers, is a piece of flesh whose worth I hold so much more than that of plain flesh. Her red heart is the miraculous act that makes the physical animate and that makes the emotional tangible. It is her red flesh that dances life against a backdrop of silence, bounded by absence. In two sequential poems at the end of her second volume, From the Cables of Genocide, Lorna Dee Cervantes contrasts a new lover with her former husband by contrasting physical hearts. In both poems the hearts are things, that is, they are physical objects, machines that do something. In “Fisherman,” for the new lover, Jay, she declares that he sleeps best,          when the ventricles of a heart slush against his chest. It is the clinical description of a flesh machine, which if belonging to him, merely states that he sleeps best when alive, and if belonging to the poet, that he sleeps best beside her. Knowing no more of the poem, I can yet metaphorize from the cool and literal description to come to an understanding that she speaks of love. This, because the flesh machine drives and articulates and makes possible the person who is the object of desire. Because of this, I can supplement what is not said, between the clinical beats and the slushing of the ventricles, with that which might not be true: with the sense of love. When she recalls the former husband in “On Finding the Slide of John in the Garden, 1973,” she does so with the description of an even cooler heart. Half a life lived listening, bearing witness to the lapping faucet drip within the furred nectar of his chest. Half a heart, womb-sunk, misted, steaming opened entrails in his midst. Viewing the photographic image of the former husband recalls the “half a life” and “half a heart” that had been and recalls a heart like a dripping faucet. In this case, the absence in between the beats of the poetic description evokes a sense of a love that had not flourished or, perhaps even, that never had been. The blank interval between faucet drips speaks to what might not have been true, clearly, to what is not, in the present moment of the poem, love. In the case of the two poems, the poet casts the heart, in the former poem, as a physiological fact and, in the latter, as a highly connotative metaphor. The results are different of course, current lover and former husband are different, but both poems function similarly to the degree that they inspire a reading between the beats of what might and might not be. And what might or might not be between her beats is also what might or might not be between my love and me. Ada’s heartbeats mean to me that a world might be. What would I do were they to stop? Each sound in her rhythm, beat and breath, is a world better because she is in it. How could the working of her red heart not mean to me a world of potential truths? Each beat I capture and each rhythm I come to know are gifts, such wanted objects of desire. In the seventy-ninth of his Cien Sonetos to Matilde Urrutia, Neruda calls to his “señora mía muy amada” and to her heart at night: De noche, amada, amarra tu corazón al mío y que ellos en el sueño derroten las tinieblas. My love, tie your heart to mine at night so that in dreams they may defeat the dark.  For the red heart is the site of love, and he can ask, amárrame al movimiento puro, a la tenacidad que en tu pecho golpea. tie me to pure motion, the tenacity that in your breast beats. My love’s black heart is real even if it is not really a heart. The black shape that adorns her pubis is a mesh of short hair, twists and curls in a heart shaped nest. I can see her black heart; she lets me touch it. I trace its perimeter, pause at the beginning of the cleft, directly in line between her navel and vaginal cut. I can see this black heart and sense it in ways that I cannot the redder, more literal heart. For her black heart is one in form only, and yet it has a prominence and presence that her red flesh does not. The lack of hidden absence that so defines the red heart is contrasted by the immediate presence of the black. The red may be essential rhythm but the black is visible and real. And while the red heart may be read so readily as the pulse of emotion and passion, the black heart is always intensely body. It need not ever confuse. It too has a magic but it is not a magic of emotion, it is, rather, the physical magic of the body, of sex. I do not lose myself in her black nest the way I do in the night forest. I weave my fingers through the small strands of moist and fragrant bush, or delight in brushing my lips across its soft surface. It is too small, this heart of hers, a hummingbird’s nest, in which to entangle myself whole. Yet its black mark against her smooth flesh, its shape of dark heart that rises from the plain of sand, nothing other than the oasis for my flesh starved flesh. It is neither the place of dreams or that other, invisible and red, beating heart. The black nest of twigs for tiny birds with luminescent wings awaits me beneath her clothes or wet rising from the bath, a fact of her life and mine, in my sight, my grasp and beneath my lips touch. It is the fragrance of damp sand, the texture of baby’s breath, and the image of itself in the shape of a heart. Two hearts. One black, the other red. In tlilli in tlapalli: in native Mexican poetry, the black and the red: the colors of the inks for writing: the colors of knowledge: the colors of life. My love has two hearts, both are real yet one is also a passion, the other is itself a sense. I have come to know her two hearts, to perceive her beside me as she exhales gently in the night, to catch her meaning when her heart races embraced in my hold, to hold her strands of black twigs preparing for flight.                eyes The magic of her dark eyes is the simple fact of their nature: they see me as I see them. A simple reciprocity that begins with the cool lumps of dark brown coal that dart and dance and defy. It is the reciprocity that enables love. And so it is perhaps in her eyes that my love begins, both that my love for her begins and that she herself comes to be in my sight. Brows, lashes, eyelids, eyes. Each element a bearer of some message at some time, each speaking in the work at perceiving me. I love that she looks at me. I love her because of what she sees in me. I love her for what her eyes are. We see each other see each other. We make each other the object of our focus in our vision of love, and we make each other whole. Seeing her eyes is the reciprocal sense of love’s mirror. My love for her begins, perhaps, in sight. There is a recurrent line that haunts me in a poem I don’t quite understand. “Verde que te quiero verde” is the first line of “Romance Sonámbulo” from García Lorca’s Romancero Gitano. The line can be translated as “Green how I want you green” or as “Green how I love you green,” for in Spanish the verb to want, querer, is also the verb to love. Either translation strikes me as moving sentiment. Yet I have puzzled at its meaning precisely where its sense takes off: green is simultaneously perception and a representation. The poem begins with four greens, Verde que te quiero verde Verde viento. Verdes ramas. Green how I want you green Green wind. Green branches. How can one person desire another person green? Can the wind be green in any way that are the branches? Is green a color or sentiment? I have taken up the matter of green seen and green understood twice before in writing I did about Frida Kahlo, in the poem, “Letters of Color,” and the essay, “Color.” But what concerns me most are my love’s eyes, and there is something about García Lorca’s use of color that brings me back to those eyes. In the first instance, color is something perceived by the sense of sight. In “Romance Sonámbulo,” the color green persists in the nexus of perception and desire, in sight, the absence of sight, and in the desire for sight. Green is imbricated in those concerns regarding seeing, not seeing, and the desire to see something. In the first stanza of the Somnambulist Romance, she dreams, verde carne, pelo verde, ojos de fría plata, green flesh, green hair, cold silver eyes. This is followed again by the refrain, “Verde que te quiero verde.” Then the matter of seeing and being seen is played out beneath a gypsy moon: Bajo la luna gitana, las cosas la están mirando y ella no puede mirarlas. Beneath the gypsy moon things watch her, and she cannot see them For García Lorca there is the profusion of green and desire played out in the question of a possibility of sight. I am reminded of a line of Neruda’s that expresses the passion of seeing the beloved, and the possibility of her absence, all within the realm of desire, Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca. Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo. To reach her, my sight searches for her. My heart searches, and she is not with me.  Yet more striking is a desperate sentiment expressed in that last of the Veinte poemas de amor and its echo in the “Romance Sonámbulo.” First, Neruda: Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos We, the later us, are no longer the same The echo in García Lorca, Pero yo ya no soy yo. Ni mi casa es ya mi casa. But I am no longer me. My house is no longer my house. For both poets sight, absence and desire interact to form a desperate confusion, where lovers lose their sense of selves and where even their house no longer is the same. The possibility of perceiving the beloved and the sense of self are intertwined in a chaos of image and desire. For García Lorca, that passion is visualized, is colored. His poems are full of green, of longing and loss and love, and full of the color green. In “Cancioncilla del Primer Deseo,” the first of the collection Amor, he clarifies his passion’s palette. The “little song of first desire” begins with green, and ends with the color of love: En la mañana verde queria ser corazón. Corazón … ¡Alma, ponte color naranja! ¡Alma, ponte color de amor! In the green morning I wanted to be heart. Heart … Soul, take on the color orange! Soul, take on the color of love! From green and the desire to be heart, to the soul and the imperative to become orange, the color of love. Heart to soul, green to orange: across that span, García Lorca holds up the site and the palette of passionate love. For me, the colors of love are red and black because love springs from Ada’s heart. For García Lorca, those colors were green and orange, different colors, but colors nonetheless. Green and orange appear in his poems as markers to visual perceptions, as indicators of the play of light on the retina. When I read his “Verde que te quiero verde,” I hear “Verte que te quiero verte.” That is, instead of “green, how I love you green,” I imagine, “to see you, how I love you, to see you.” And the color green transforms throughout the poem and according to García Lorca’s vision, as green the color of seeing the object of desire: verde becomes verte; green becomes to see you. By rereading, I imagine sight the color of a poem in which color and object are personified: Verde que te quiero verde Verde viento. Verdes ramas. To see you, how I love you, to see you Green breath. Green limbs. In my reading, color blends intimately with light and with love. Light illuminates the beloved amid the spectrum refracted and illuminates the lover who sees his beloved. And in a different way too, light illuminates the lovers who cannot physically see their beloved, yet who desire. In “Romance Sonámbulo,” physical separation can preclude seeing the beloved, even with the light of a gypsy moon. Green and orange vivify the image of love, first as the perceptive response to the physics of light and second as the emotive creation of meaning. The colors of sensation and of sense. Ada’s eyes are the darkest brown. Not quite the near astronomical jet that is her hair, save for the strands of burnt brown, but dark, so much so that her black pupils, which jump in diameter in response to my words, my touch, are all but lost in the greater circle of deep near black. In low light it is as if her entire iris is a fantastically interested pupil, taking in ever nuance of a move I make or of thought perceived. And in brighter glare they are mirrors, reflecting my own eyes watching hers as she watches me watch her. In seeing her reflecting and she me, we come sensing ourselves in the sense and sensing of the loved. My love begins then, in the twin lumps of cool coal, burnt brown in color. It is then in sight that love is first born. And for García Lorca that sight arises in the bits of the spectrum where green and orange break out of white light and define a sky and color an emotion. They are the colors that color an image, that evoke a presence, that paint desire. They signal, perhaps, love’s sense, a meaning of vegetation, of life, of my favorite fruit amid the leaves of its tree. Without meaning a biblical allusion, I find that the meaning of the sense of color and tree and fruit can be taken to include knowledge. And for this my love’s darkest brown eyes evoke the colors of her two hearts, red and black. This not because the appear these colors, not even the black, truly, but because red and black are the colors of the meaning of her eyes. Ada’s eyes are the color of night sky in fog given a tint edge of coal brown, and yet they are the red and the black as is her heart. I look into her deepest brown and she looks into my eyes in the same moment. Through that color, with that color, we break the spectrum of light and fashion a palette. We see each other’s color with our own and we imagine each other and come to know. It is like reading if reading could be rendered carnal. We see, we sense, we make sense, we come to know. My love is born there in her eyes, for those twin points of focus are exactly the points I come to know my love. She and I spend time looking into each other’s eyes. Time, which does not exist anyway, even fails for us as imaginary social construct. We drop from its illusion in our practice of sight, in the interplay of presence and absence, and in the light of desire. For when she looks into my eyes, I know that she is seeing me, and as she does, she makes me her lover, her only love outside any time. “Todo te lo tragaste, como la lejanía,” says Neruda in “La Canción Desesperada,” “Como el mar, como el tiempo,” “you swallowed up everything, like distance,” “like the sea, like time.” She sees me and I she: we are so close at times, and yet that she is with me while always impossibly apart from me, defies while it asserts our proximity. The sense and sensation of sight function in the space between: “Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca,” Neruda says in the ultimate of Veinte poemas de amor, “to reach her, my sight searches for her.” Her night sky play of dark and light is her magic that fills me with desire. I know this. My love begins there in her eyes, here in the red and black that is the combined color of knowledge. Her eyes work apart from mine and synchronize with mine in making ourselves for ourselves together. If time truly existed, this fact would be impossible. The relentless flow of sequence and the isolation of order would preclude our working presence and absence together and against each other, simultaneously in the human act of love. From her eyes begins a play of light, a vision, a sense, and then a knowing. The spectrum bits are deepest brown and white and the gloss from the smooth wet glass of the cornea. The eyes of Ada are red and black and color the birth of love. They reciprocate a recognition of the beloved and set about internal self reflection. Her eyes are the sights of knowing, a sensory writing in the carnal brain that is the flesh of emotion and the sensual imaging of a heart of two colors. She holds me in her sight, and I am whole there, where I both am and can never be but for desire. Her eyes impart a knowledge, at once physical and imagined, that is a knowledge more real than any other she does not see.                ombligo The scar on Ada’s abdomen, which marks her prenatal umbilical link deserves a better name than is rendered by the English. Navel seems to me plainly banal. I prefer instead the mantra of the Spanish with its round sounds beginning and ending at what must be the center of the universe. And yet it is a name enveloped in silence, a meditative mute scar, that mantra on the puzzle of life stemming from other life. For that’s what the ombligo is: a center of human life’s origins and a caesura in the line of human life. Yet unlike the organs of perception, it is remarkably inactive. And unlike the heart, the breath, the voice, it is silent. It is, after all, a scar, a visual trace of the story that ends with her birth, when she sprang whole, apart from another. It is then a site of mystery. For I am drawn into a one sided gaze of Ada’s birth scar when she lies naked beside me. I focus on it as if it were the nucleus of her flesh, the compass center from which radiate her pudendum, legs, arms, and all that is her body. In line between her two sets of articulate lips, the verbal and the sexual, her ombligo is prominent in its passivity and its poverty. A mystery in its silence and its inarticulateness and in its clue to the history of her body before me. Silent scar on the body I love, it is for some reason a focal point of my love. Perhaps I mean that love is a scar of separation. In Portuguese love is amor; for the Brazilian poet, Nelson Ascher, more specifically, it is the title of a poem in his collection, O sonho da razão. For the poet, amor is a matter of alterity, a matter of sensing love across the distance that is the space of others separate from ourselves. That matter seems to me, a very passive sensing, one by which love transpires in the most subtle of perceptions. In “Amor,” perception by each of the five senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, is an impassioned reach across the impossible distance between lovers. O olhar desapropria a forma alheia, o ouvido sequestra a voz alheia, o olfato rapta o odor  alheio, o paladar rouba o sabor alheio, o tato furta a carne alheia, ou seja, a própria. Sight appropriates the other form, hearing confiscates the other voice, smell ravishes the other scent, taste steals the other flavor, and of the flesh, taste seizes the other, that is, it’s own. I recall these lines beside Ada when I perceive her body’s soft, central scar. Compared to her eyes or heart, it is less expressive and invites an experience of silence, perhaps of distance. Compared to the organs of four of the senses, it seems inexpressive and not able to perceive me. But what is the ombligo in that it is a scar? As such, it is mark of former trauma and a history of healing and separation. But it is a trace on the surface of her body, a mark of skin, and the skin is such a huge organ for the sense of touch. At one and the same time, Ada’s ombligo testifies silently to a physical separation that will be forever beyond me and to the tactile receptivity that her skin affords when we make love. In this, the latter way, the soft, healed cut on the skin at the center of my beloved’s body makes sense to me, sense like the meaning of the Portuguese in the Brazilian’s poem.  In “Amor,” the senses actively receive the beloved. The lover’s perception of the beloved is by the means appropriation, by the taking from the other human who is the object of desire. The sense of sight takes her form, hearing her voice, while taste, smell, and touch steal her scent, flavor, and flesh. Each in accordance with its own means and each after its own object, the five senses seize the beloved. The senses seize passively in that they perceive with desire the beloved separated by the impossible distance of separation and yet actively in that the senses seize as much as the very flesh itself. It is as if “Amor” emphasizes the lover’s acts of perceiving and seizing while relegating the beloved’s role to that of an object to be perceived and seized. Such an understanding of love’s perception would be unlike my sense of looking into my Ada’s eyes, fixed in the act that is a double self-conscious reciprocity. Yet even though amor in Brazilian verse may be conceived as the act of a lover perceiving, it is not ultimately a solitary act. And such too is the case with Ada’s present day and Chicana ombligo. In “Amor” the five senses go far beyond sensation; they reach across the distance separating two people and seize, as physically as the particular sense allows, the beloved. The sense of taste steals from the beloved the specific flavor that that other human body exudes. Because the sense of taste relies on a greater proximity than do sight, hearing, or smell, taste’s appropriation of the other is more carnal. And in Spanish too, like in the Portuguese, there is great emphasis on the experience of love through the taste of the beloved. An untranslatable popular love song, “Sabor a mi,” repeats the refrain, “en la voca llevarás, sabor a mi,” which can be rendered in English, poorly, as “in my mouth, you’ll take my flavor.” Odd sounding in English, but extremely romantic in Romance languages. But if any of the senses were more carnal than taste, it would be touch, for “touch seizes the flesh of the other.” The flesh itself is the organ of touch, and it encompasses a proximate, physical totality beyond the scope of the other senses. Sight works at a distance and perceives just the image of the beloved, but touch actually touches, flesh on flesh. Yet the self conscious reciprocity I had accorded the organs of sight is not, in the end, their domain alone. For in “Amor,” touch seizes the other flesh, that is, its own. In the end, the carnal contact of touch at zero distance cancels the impossible separation of lovers, one from the other. And beyond plain distance, difference is itself cancelled. The sense of love renders the other flesh, its’s own. In this way, the lover and the beloved are both simultaneously objects and subjects of love. And in this simultaneity, distance and difference are cancelled even while that cancellation is itself dependent upon that distance and that difference. “Amor” ends: sabe a um outro o paladar alheio, tateia o tato alheio um outro, o seja, o mesmo the other taste tastes of another the other touch grasps another, that is, the same. Such ambiguity confronts me when I press my scar to Ada’s or when my fingers trace the smooth flow of skin to the small soft fold on the surface of her abdomen at the center of her body. Her ombligo is reticent, passive, and seems by sight unaware of my presence and unable to forge expression. But by the sense of touch it reacts and encourages my touch and makes possible the impossible cancellation and celebration of difference, of the one and the other, that is, the same. When we press scars together, in the posture of man and woman making the story of the human race, the touch of her ombligo and mine makes physical fact the sense expressed by the Mayans in the phrase, “in lak’ esh,” “you are my other self.” It is true that the ombligo is a scar that marks a physical separation in the past. Yet it is also true that it marks a former union of two in one. And more importantly for me, Ada’s scar makes story with mine in the sense of touch in Brazil and with a sense conscious of the Mayan.                skin Her body is covered with skin. It is so much of what I know of her body. For except for hair and nails and the diversion of slit and puncture that mark the human and her feminine body, she is most visible as a surface of skin, a perceptible exterior that appears for itself and that obscures a vital and private interior. Different than the surfaces of hair and nails, it differs even more so at those openings to the interior: the skin of her eyelids or lips which parts to reveal the eyes themselves or the teeth and tongue. Skin is the shape of her surface, is the form I know. Even more than the structure of her bones, which some say defines the human form, skin is the shape she is. By all of my senses I know her skin as her self. It covers no essence of Ada but is how I know her when I press my mouth and nose to her neck, trace the plane of her back with the palm my right hand, watch her move in different positions and light, and even when she strokes my ear with the tip of a finger or her lips. By my perceptions, including, I am convinced, that of hearing, so much of what she is, comes to be known to me in the fact of skin. Perhaps one of the best ways I come to know her is during a moment of repose: she lies besides me, face down, her hair thrown up, away from her shoulders. I press my palm onto the broad plane of skin that is her back, perhaps just inside the waist and slide up, pressing firmly, up and in beside the spine or out slightly, above the ribbed surface to the shoulder blade. And there are the rounded cliffs of the shoulders themselves, smooth drop off points for my two hands that slide up from her shoulder blades, out across the shoulder, and that dive for her upper arms. Beneath the broad plane of her smooth surface lies an interior I imagine of things, bones, muscles. Yet with my eyes and my pressing palms it is her skin I know. At times Ada will ask me to press down between her neck and shoulder or slide up again and again tracing the edge of her shoulder blade. I imagine an interior of bone guiding my path and at times, a hidden world of muscle and sinew netted in tight knot. Other times I watch her, look at as much skin as is possible from one vantage point at one time, watch her move her skin and hair and nails and eyes in light and shadow as she moves, moving sometimes to music. When we are very close, our tongues and our ears know skin. There have been times when her back on my tongue has tasted like the ocean and her left shoulder like some fruit, something distantly like apricot but more subtle, and the nape of her neck, like tamarind, the only time I’ve truly liked that taste. And the next morning, the ocean has receded and the taste is fine beige sand, the fruit has sweetened like jam, and the tamarind is gone, completely gone, leaving behind the taste of damp earth and green vegetation. Moments have been so quiet among us that her breast brushing across my ear has sounded like fire. And the faint hum from the skin of her thigh, when my nails trace a map where we’ve been, has sounded like a distant choir, sincere and peaceful. The completeness that is her skin is the completeness I find with my senses, any one of which spills over and confounds with the others. I know Ada as the dancing skin that tastes like a subtle but uncertain fruit and whose broad smooth plain sounds at times like a cathedral. I know her because I know her skin. Her simple surface provides so complex a perception. Her skin is a salsa, both guaguanco and pico de gallo, caliente and picante. In the poem, “Seis,” from Variaciones Sobre una Tempestad, Lucha Corpi begins with the scent of skin and continues to vision and to spells: El olor de tu piel era moreno entonces … y en tus ojos mi cuerpo adivinaba el negro sortilegio del fuego Then, your skin’s scent was dark … and my body divined the black spell of fire in your eye Love as magic; the smell skin as the birth of spell. For Corpi, the magic of knowing the other begins at a confusion of the senses, for it is not that her beloved’s skin was dark but that its scent is. In so few lines there is a sensual poetry of the senses that entwines sense and sentiment in the perception of the body: skin smells dark and the lover’s body divines in the beloved’s eyes. In “Seis,” both magic and poetry begin in the perception of the body’s skin. For the poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko, knowledge of the surface begins with a assertion of the human body’s similarity with stone. The prose poem, “Island of Sirens,” in Description, translated by Lyn Hejinian, declares “Granite is 40% water. Stone pores… You and I–pure time.” Human motion is followed by silence and a contemplation of the possibility of the skin of stone, She takes the hand from her breast, regards the lines on the ceiling, comparing them with the lines on the wallpaper. The two are silent…. The complexity of surface leaves me at a dead end. The sensation of complexity dulled. The simplicity of the surface in the stone’s totality frustrates me…. I see a stone. I write–is the stone some immutable condition, compelling one to write? An impulse. And I answer–no. But it is also not a whim. In that case do I see some thing, an object, in order to begin to write, to conceive of an object in “all” its relationships with “me,” continuing? Color and time–one and the same…. The mind does not need eyes since it doesn’t feel pain. The stone signifies something else–simply that it isn’t. I see the stone. Skin, in the case of Dragomoschenko, the skin of stone, is the paradoxically simple and complex surface that one perceives, apprehends, knows. The matter is compounded by the nature of homogeneous stone, so seemingly without skin. The “objectness” of stone is apparent, for even if it can be perceived by its surface “skin,” stone is inanimate, a nonhuman thing. And so for Dragomoschenko, the paradoxically impossible and real problem of knowing something outside one’s self is made more emphatic because the inspiration for knowing and writing is an inanimate, nonhuman thing. And the point of beginning to know another occurs in the apprehension of surface, not in the apprehension of a totality or of an obscure interior. Skin is the what we perceive; it is what we know. Lucha Corpi’s poem, “Seis” concludes in the following lines: tu boca me empujaba mar adentro hasta las márgenes tempestuosas de la lluvia y el viento your mouth pushed me inside sea to the tempestuous edge of the rain and the wind. “Seis” begins with the scent of skin and ends at storm’s edge. In a way, Corpi’s poem of love and skin speaks to an issue similar to that in Dragomoschenko’s poem about stone and skin. For both, the surface is where a difficult knowledge begins, where color and scent, as well as color and time, coalesce in the subject of perception. For both, surface is the edge that marks the beginning of the object, or subject, of our perception. For Corpi, love begins in the encounter with skin, at the tempestuous edges that separate us. For both poets, the perception of skin is a reflexive act, in which “en tus ojos mi cuerpo adivinaba” “‘all’ its relationships with ‘me.’” Ada’s skin’s colors are subtle. Her shoulders are a smooth brown without friction, a brown that invites the taste of fruit born at the edge of tempests. Her face is the brown of guitar as my fingers slide effortlessly from D13 flat fifth, flat ninth, to G major 7. Her thighs are the brown of an hour of bells, a season, and an echo unexpected. Every shade of brown, she is an edge, some tempestuous, none stone. Every one invites and demarcates an absolute edge, a difference that is impossible and real and that she is.                lips Lips are a special sort of skin. They are a surface and a break in surface, at once a defence from the outside and an invitation to the in. Even when pressed together so that neither word or breath can pass between, even then when they mask the break in Ada’s smooth and continuous skin, even then they are distinct from the surrounding skin from which they emerge. Her face, the surface of her chin, cheek, and the band of skin between her nose and lip proper, is brown, the brown of pomegranates when they pollinate or of wood freshly cut. But her lips are colored red, the bark of madrone caught for a moment in the straight horizontal light breaking through the thick green of redwoods. Their break with her surface of skin is even more dramatic because it is not only a break in surface, a tear between outside and in, but a break in time, an active breaking. Lips are skin, a special type of skin: they are the surface and they are an opening in surface. If skin itself is an edge, separating the body from what lies beyond, then lips are the edge of that edge, for they break with that separation and render visible the interior. The break with surface is further one in quality as well, for the skin separates the body from another by passive presence, but lips, lips are most active in their articulation, connecting inside with out. The existential fact of skin is what makes surface appear as a totality. The quality of its being is so much the fabric of its nature that skin denotes existence itself. But lips move. They sing, they part and reveal teeth, they smile, they purse. Lips are the moving portal, opening and closing and taking shape, through which pass words, which in some ways are the best vehicles for making contact between two lovers, interior to interior, across the differences of surface, space and the great divide. Lips break the body the surface in two ways: in the cut they make in the impervious edge of separation and in the motion they impart across the planes of smooth brown and silent skin. These two types of breaks are but one in the nature of lips, for the physical tear they are is what allows the passage of inner word, sob, smile, kiss. Ada’s lips are a most special site on the surface of her skin; they make for a break in her body’s definition and isolation that allows me to love. In the necessary irony that is love, my love for the totality that she is only comes to be in breaks from that totality. My love for Ada is one born across the impossible separation of two people, engendered by her lips in the cut and acts that allow contact and interaction with her interior. For this reason I take issue with Juan Felipe Herrera. His book of prose poetry, The Roots of a Thousand Embraces, investigates the possibility of touch in an encounter with the body and with Frida Kahlo, the most carnal of Mexican painters. In the first two poems, “Prologue: A Second Body” and “Mobius,” Herrera begins with concerns very similar to mine regarding skin and lips. The first poem identifies a scar as a rebirth, for scar makes the break in the body surface where something new can emerge and transform the individual. The scar he describes is the factual scar that Frida Kahlo received from a wound he explains in “Fuselage Rail”: “a busted fuselage rail jammed through Frida’s eighteen year old pubis.” In that poem and two others, “Gold Glittering” and the prologue, the wounding of Kahlo’s vaginal lips makes for a scar that profoundly affects her: she is reborn, emerges anew, and reveals herself to the outside world through her art. Herrera opens and closes “Prologue: A Second Body” with two thoughts: Think on the time it takes a scar to heal …  It is the healing of this metaphysical fracture too (which may invoke further breakage) that concerns me. The ensuing poems reflect on that break in Frida’s body, on the time it takes to seal, and on the expression of her inner life that spills out. It is “Mobius,” the first poem proper, that I take issue with. After Herrera declares that the scar gives rise to Kahlo’s second body, he describes the surface of her body by considering its second skin: her body cast. I take issues with a literal reading of most of the poem. It reads: Maybe, here, the body or appreciation is in the degrees of light, non-line and texture, especially when the light shaft becomes obscure, half-lit–when it goes into the structure behind the gesso of the cast. There is no top, no bottom–and of course, no beginning or end, since one body leads into the other–a mobius body with one side only and a backside we will never see, logically; there are only beginnings. I will repeat this often. There are no time frames, really. It goes against the notion of love. The body as mobius skin, as one continuous surface, is a topological illusion that springs from the apparent totality of skin. The body of woman, the roots of a thousand embraces that Herrera finds in Frida Kahlo’s body, or the smooth completeness that I sense in the perception of Ada’s skin, can be taken as that image: continuous, total, physical, mobius. If the surface that Herrera describes covering the second body were taken to be skin, simply skin, then the notion of the “mobius body” would be coterminus with skin, and skin, essentially with the body. But this is not the case, for the second skin is a cast and only “maybe, here, the body.” Not only is the second surface spatially discontiguous with the body, it is temporally discontinuous as well, something that “goes against the notion of love.” It is this aporia in “maybe, here, the body” that renders comprehensible the impossible yet factual dynamic of Ada’s skin. And it is the temporality of the notion of love that renders comprehensible the break in her skin that is her lips. Ada’s lips move. They are a break in the surface of her body, yet more significantly, they are a break in that surface’s time. These are illusory facts in the description of factual illusion, for her body does not really, fully coincide with its smooth brown surface, nor does the motion of her lips constitute the only motion of her skin. She moves and her skin moves all the time, even in sleep. I know, I’ve watched. But the illusion of the totality of skin, of its ability to stand so completely for the body, is such that the movement of a body seems less a characteristic of skin than it does a body’s identity. The notion of surface seems closely tied to essence. The emphasis of an illusion of essence can render the surface of the body atemporal as well: the importance of smooth brown skin is simply that it is Ada and not that she moves. But her lips do move. They change shape, they form words, they kiss. And this break with the illusion of the totality of skin, renders the lips a very special skin, one that functions to mark the illusion of time. When Ada kisses me, she gently purses her lips, moves toward me, presses her lips to my lips, to my cheek or my chest, and kisses, emitting the slight sound of soft glass breaking. Then she stops kissing, perhaps pulls away, perhaps begins again. There is an order to her kisses, not the regimentation of fixed behavior, but the order of sequence that makes me believe in the illusion of time. She will kiss me, she is kissing me, she kissed me. There is a sequence of tense and a sequence in the unfolding of the kiss itself. Her red lips give my world an order of kissing just as they do, an order of speaking. Her red lips form to shape kisses and reach and touch me. Her red lips shape to form words and reach and touch me. The sequence of kiss and the order of words she speaks to me make me search her body for meaning: at some moments I desire more than anything her kiss; at others, I understand what she feels. Her red lips send love from within her out to me in the shapes of kisses and of words. I long to receive them, to understand them in their flow from beginning, middle, to end. Her red lips make me believe in finite time, believe that she cannot stay kissing me for all eternity, that each of our two bodies will die. Ada’s lips break with the smooth surface of skin. They provide meaning to the domain of being. Yet to undercut the illusion of the whole essence of surface, lips propound the illusion of time. It is as if skin and the break with surface that is the lips, foster a love that is an essence, born of the senses but without temporality, and therefore, without sense, and foster a love that is sequential, born of the movement in time, and therefore, terminal. In Herrera’s poem, those loves are mobius, “no top, no bottom–and of course, no beginning or end”: love of the skin or if the scar is contiguous and continuous, a single flow of surface “with one side only” where “there are only beginnings.” It is here that I take issue with Herrera. It seems to me that the notions of the mobius skin and the time loop of eternal beginnings feed off each other, perhaps logically, but illusory. It is as if a smooth surface makes for an unbroken skin, which makes for an unbroken time, turning forever back upon itself in the flow of love. But then too, perhaps Herrera is playing. After all, he ends the poem, “it goes against the notion of love.” Ada’s lips are part of the smooth brown surface of her body, yet they are the color pomegranates stain, even when she is still, such as when she is sleeping or while reading these words now. Her lips move and shape meaning in breath and sound and kiss. She whistles in the prettiest of fashions. Hers are the only lips I have ever kissed, and most of the words I know passed her lips first. When she kisses me time neither starts nor stops nor goes on. This is how I know our love cannot die. It just is. Ada’s skin is smooth brown, her lips, pomegranate. Her mouth presses onto my mouth, our lips seal. Her breath is mine, her sighs are mine, she holds my tongue in her mouth. Our love is and makes sense. It has no beginning nor will it end. She is sleeping now, dreaming of me. Her lips press together, in the dim light they seem the color of dark cherry. She might speak, she might kiss. She might not.                  breasts My love’s breasts are two plums and a world unto themselves. Poets have know this possible and have imagined the bodies of women this way. Ada’s two breasts are ripe plums that I take together in both my hands or singularly by my mouth. And they are a soft, giving embodiment of an outside world that is rarely so. That they are both plums and a world at once is true and so because they are a vital part of the whole and a universe at the same time. They are ripe fruit demanding seizing, yet they are not apples, nothing like them, for there is no sin nor religious act in their taking. My love’s breasts are the fabric of soft human skin, nothing divine, and come alive in her movement and breath and in the beat of her heart. They wake me from sleep with the gentle pressure of ripe fruit longing in summer. Days go by thus when my sleep is broken by the call to harvest. And they hold their summer glow in the fog of winter too, warm to my touch, somehow refusing to release the heat of past noons to the current air or present blanket but releasing heat just to my simple touch. Ada’s breasts are the vital, verdant incarnation of the flesh of the female of the species. They are not signs or markers of the feminine but rather, the small fruits of that which is the female human, each piece itself a vital whole. In the thirteenth-century, Guido Cavalcanti wrote something of the spirit of the life of one woman. His lines in the vernacular Italian were lines that sang her spirit of life, a spirit vital, vernal, verdant: Fresca rosa novella, piacente primavera, per prata e per rivera gaiamente cantando, vostro fin presio mando–a la verdura, Fresh new rose, new spring, beside the stream, amid the blades of grass I sing your virtues joyfully to the green. In the rose and spring foliage, Cavalcanti found an intense vitality that he described in one woman, the object of his love. In another poem, a sonnet, Cavalcanti located his beloved within desire and the world, amid verdant flora and light: Avete ‘n vo’ li fior’ e la verdura e ciò che luce od è bello a vedere; risplende più che sol vostra figura: chi vo’ non vede, ma’ non pò valere. In questo mondo no ha creatura sì piena di bieltà né di piacere; e chi d’amor si teme, lu’ assicura vostro bel vis’ a tanto ‘n see volere. In you are flowers and the green and that which glows, beauty to be seen; your form brighter than the sun shines, any denied your sight, are valor denied. In this world no other has your beauty and your grace, and any who fears love, is made to love by the desire to see the beauty of your face. Between rosa and verdura, the poet not only attributes to her a lush vitality, but he imagines her as one fresh new rose, with its striking rose color and fragrance, set against the world of the flora, against the verdant sea of green, green plant life. She is at once a striking, specific rose and yet she is too the whole, the verdant vital spirit. In this way my love’s breasts are two plums, ripe and full, and they are a world singular and whole. They are the size of my hands, vital pieces of fruit-flesh, tiny buds in comparison to the verdant universe of flora with its tropical green ravines and wide expanse of fields the color of sand and earth and gold. In sonnet twenty of his Cien sonetos, Neruda asks his beloved Matilde, “dónde están escondidos tus senos,” “where are your breasts hidden,” and explains that her breasts are small in the large worlds of flora, of astronomy, of politics, and ultimately, of his desire, Son mínimos como dos copas de trigo. Me gustaría verte dos lunas en el pecho: las gigantescas torres de tu soberanía. They are small, two cups of wheat. I would like to see you, two moons on your chest: the giant towers of your sovereignty. The two handfuls of breast are also two moons fashioned by desire in a love that encompasses extremes, “amor, te amo por clara y por oscura” “love, I love you for your bright light and dark.” Sonnet forty again fashions Matilde according to a vital and verdant desire, “Era verde el silencio, mojada era la luz,” “green was the silence, wet was the light.” Two Latin American poets, the Haitian, Aimé Césaire and the Argentine, Juan Gelman, describe breasts as part of the world natural and political. Césaire, the poet of negritude, describes the black breasts of a black desire. He locates the breasts in the world of natural objects in his prose poem, “Samba,” part of his collection Soleil cou coupé: Tout ce qui d’anse c’est agglutiné pour former tes seins toutes les cloches d’hibiscus toutes les huîtres perlières toutes les pistes brouillées qui forment une mangrove toute ce qui’il y a de soleil en réserve dans les lézards de la sierra tout ce qu’il faut d’iode pour faire un jour marin tout ce qu’il faut de nacre pour dessiner un bruit de conque sous-marine. Everything from the bay condensed to form your breasts all the hibiscus bells all the pearl oysters all the crossed tracks that form a mangrove every bit of the sun stored in sierra lizards everything needed from iodine to make a marine day everything needed from mother of pearl to sketch the noise of a conch underwater. Juan Gelman’s life has been shaped by exile and intimately so by the brutal facts of Argentine politics, where people are objects that can be made to disappear. In “Southward,” he comes to know the small handfuls of breast through a cartography of the Americas and through a politics that is both historical and sensual: te amo/señora/como al sur/ una mañana sube de tus pechos/ toco tus pechos y tocu una mañana del sur/ una mañana como dos fragancias/ de la fragancia de una nace la otra/ o sea tus pechos como dos alegrías/ de una alegría vuelven los compañeros muertos en el sur/ establecen su dura claridad/ de la otra vuelven al sur/vivos por la alegría que sube de vos/ la mañana que das como almitas volando/ almando el aire con vos/ I love you/señora /as I do the south / morning springs from your breasts / I touch your breasts and I touch a southern morning/ a morning like two fragrances / from the fragrance of one is born the other/ or perhaps your breasts like two joys/ from one joy return the compañeros dead in the south/ and establish their hard clarity/ from the other they return south/alive by the joy that springs from you/ the morning you give like souls flying/ making soul the air with you/ For Gelman, the flesh of woman is the means to grasp, to know the love of a woman. The physical makes real the possibility of love itself: the warmth of you / woman who exists so that somewhere love may exist /  Ada’s breasts do more than sate my hands’ grasp, or satisfy my mouth’s carnal urge, or fill the space between us when I pull her to me tight. They are more than smooth flesh welcoming. They are something more, whole, such that if I were to consider them without dissipating the drive by touching each with a finger or tongue, I’d be struck by awe and pervasive frustration. For at times her breasts are so much more than warm parts of her, much more than warm, soft female flesh: they are at those times indivisible and signify nothing beyond the fact of the breasts themselves. They are not so much alive as they are life, and before them I wonder and poets stumble. Plums that ripen before me, for me at moments when we are together alone. They are firm and soft and when I bite they are sweet and excite my sense of taste. I love to watch each in profile or both directly on, bright in the weak light as day fades or in their subtle dance in the humid breeze from the gulf. They are then, or soon after, or before the moon, two bays, and the entire south and west of the pacific and all its gulfs. They are weather and an entire planet of desire, moist in the sweat of making love. Lost in sex or desire or the occurrence at the moment, they call me back from the dark, back from the clarity of noon, back for a grasp of fruit and the taste of everything.                nipples Again, as with “navel,” I am confronted by the paucity of the English to stand for this aspect of my beloved’s flesh. Yet “nipple” sounds to me even sillier than does “navel,” and both simply fail to mean anything that I mean when I speak and imagine her body. “Aureola” is much better for its music of vowels. “Aureola,” is melody, Italianate, perhaps early baroque, distinct from the carnivalesque of the English. Yet “aureola” is not better for sense: its color is wrong, the luminescent play of light on dark, the opposite of the darker, rounded island of skin at the point of the breast. And it is wrong in its connotation of the religious, for there is nothing holy in my seizing by my mouth the dark halos of Ada’s breasts: they are breasts of flesh, carnal and human, alive and real. And yet I do not like the Spanish, pezón, and conclude here my concern for names. The darker brown islands at the points of Ada’s lighter brown breasts are as I describe: flesh that is carnal and human, alive and real. Were I fluent in the lexicon of architecture and defined my love by its terms, I would note the smooth sweep of line, the structural determinacy, that rises clean from her chest in a form that defines the flow of breast and that culminates at the peak of the brown arch and point of nipple. I would realize the purpose of the whole of the breast. But that vision strikes me as inherently inhuman, cold in its obsession for structure and material, even if its fixation upon the visual fascinates. The nipples on my love’s breasts, the slightly raised darker island and the small points of the nipple itself, are warm; they are made of a skin that emerges from the breast triumphant and with slight defiance. This cannot be appreciated by the visual alone. And yet, their sight is telling, very much so. Her nipples appear warm upon the soft tissue of the breast, demanding my attention and fixing my line of sight. The language of surface and essence is insufficient for their apprehension, just as the word divine is, for their depiction. They are proud points of feminine flesh without nave or arch, name or architect. They can only be apprehended, to the degree that language can apprehend, in the language of the flesh, in the human sense that seeks neither higher truth nor rends surface from essence. There in the vocabulary of the body, there their sight can be envisioned, and the surprise of their revelation, meted out in syllables. The words that grasp my love’s breasts, take her nipples are words that capture the flash of sight, and make sense of image as they become revealed. For while breasts are the soft form of flesh, the nipples are the centers of focus. They are the points of focus my eyes seize upon when Ada removes a blouse. They are the human islands that draw me to encounter my beloved. Julia de Burgos captures some of the sense of being so struck by an image in her poem, “Canción desnuda.” me salté a la pureza de un amor sin ropajes que cargaba mi vida de lo irreal a lo humano, y hube de verme toda en un grito de lágrimas, ¡en recuerdo de pájaros! I sprang to the purity of a love without clothes that moved my life from the unreal to the human, I had to see all of myself in a scream of tears, in a memory of birds! Her life is moved from the unreal to the realm of the human by a love revealed in her naked song. The purity of a love disrobed can move her to interaction with the human, away from the nonhuman, unreal world of architecture or the divine, for example, and toward the actual, the vital and carnal. The nipples on my love’s breasts are brown islands taking flight. The rise from the soft, smooth, lighter skin, standing ready to take to the air. Even with eyes closed, I see them: the two small islands, brown emerging from sand indistinctly, for there is no sharp edge, the beginning of island and the end of breast beach. The darker color intensifies gradually over a tiny distance, at once almost, the smooth arch of breast gives way to darker skin, which shapes itself up as if to fly, and a nipple waves. The island is yet smooth but differs from the skin of the breast in that it marked for memory: tiny soft bumps attest to the fact of the island. The nipples themselves are soft points. They announce the breast in the climax of structure and hint at flight. They draw attention and focus thought, in memory of birds. When I look upon Ada’s nipples I am keenly aware that I am with her. I touch the breasts and gently take a nipple between my fingers, or if I am so fortunate, I take a nipple gently between my teeth, then my lips, and pull the whole island in my mouth. I am made aware that we two are beside each other and that sight has lead to focus and touch. I am aware that she and I are aware of ourselves together and that together we shed any disconnection from the world and embrace the flesh of one another. It is true that at those moments I do not think of architecture or of religion and that I lose myself in our most human embrace. And in those times that I am consoled and tortured solely by memory, in those times when she is gone from my side, I can yet press her nipples with my tongue. She comes to me in image at moments, but I am left only images of birds. For the sight of her nipples so excites my sense of touch, that I grasp for the carnal world, the only world where two people actually meet. When we are apart, memory substitutes sadly for sight, and in her absence I am left in the solitary world of the unreal looking for a way back. In “Que me quiere en verde,” Julia de Burgos contemplates the lover’s absence in a poem of imperative desire: Al aire lo complico con mi fuga del mundo porque no estás presente. ¡Quiéreme, claridad! ¡Arroyo mío, quiéreme; revienta las estrellas y trae al cielo a verme y a decirme en tormentas, que me quieres en verde! I complicate my flight from the world to the sky because you are not present. Love me, clarity! My stream, love me; rip the stars and take to the heavens to see me and to tell me in storms, that you love me in green! Absence is met with the demand to be loved and ultimately, with the demand to be loved in green. The latter is perhaps an irrational demand, as is perhaps the former demand to be loved, but it is uttered apart from the beloved, uttered in a state of the unreal. But then, as García Lorca’s green can be read as color as well as infinitive and object of desire, so too can de Burgos’s “en verde,” “in green,” be read as “en verdad,” “in truth.” “Love me in green” would be, “Love me in truth.” Green may be the color of an unreal and irrational desire articulated in absence. The presence of the beloved would make possible the encounter with another person, and therefore, the encounter with the human world. The darker brown of Ada’s islands and soft points is a fact of presence, beginning with vision and climaxing in touch. It is morning, or perhaps it is summer. The humid air from the Gulf of California blows gently across the sand of Ada’s breasts, this must be so even if I cannot see it now, for she stands with her back to me and to the sea. I don’t want this moment to end, and I kill it with anxious desire. I savor the slight wait and cannot stand it: then, she turns to face me, slowly, so slowly, an opera might have begun and ended and begun again as she turns. She looks into my eyes, she holds a towel before her: her hands meet just below her chin; her forearms fan out, down, each across a breast, the towel pressed. She speaks to me; I have difficulty understanding her words. She approaches me. In the next moment I reach for the towel, take it, and let it drop to the sand at her feet. In that moment I am transfixed by two brown islands, soft against the sand of each breast, and I focus on the nipples, one then the other, which rise slightly, pause, then take flight before my eyes like the memory of birds but real. In that moment I reach to her, and she presses toward me. Between us lies the nothing filled by presence, and her nipples press into my hands, my chest, my mouth, with a singular ease and joy that is purely human.                feet Of all the organs of my beloved’s body, her feet come the closest to exciting in me the virulent emotion of jealousy. There are some who believe that the human spirit is articulated in the conflict of emotions, that the arousal of love, for example, must be contingent on the appearance of an equally intense but diametrically opposed emotion. And those who posit that in the West, romantic love was first delineated by the Troubadours of Provence in the twelfth century, envision that the existence of true love is contingent upon the existence of such an equally true, but opposite, emotion. Examples of this are the second and twenty first rules of love from De Arte Honesti Amandi by Andreas Capellanus: “He who does not feel jealousy is not capable of loving” and “The feeling of true love is always increased by true jealousy.” I believe that my beloved makes me human. When we encounter, the two of us make each other in the sight and at the touch of flesh; at the carnal affirmation, we realize in our contact. I do agree that as love is human, so to is jealousy. Both, emotional modes of knowing the self and the other, both intense, and both humanly real. But I am not a jealous man. Having said that, I am faced with Ada’s feet, the very tools that propel her through space, that take her from my side in the middle of the night for a drink of water, as well as to distances much greater from me, now even, before I knew her, and in our future as well. I take a foot of hers in my hands and bring it gently before my face, and I stare intently in wonder. And in appreciation of the very organs that enable the motion that she is, at the same moment, I am driven as close as I come to jealousy. I paid little attention to her feet when we first became acquainted: there were after all, the spectacle of her pubic mound and hips, which I appreciated despite her clothing; and her face with the most expressive eyes, alive; and a mouth that shaped words as if to kiss. And when finally we were intimate, I admit that I almost ignored her organs of walking, for again I was caught up in the delight of the senses that exploded across so many focal points at once and in so many sequences for me. It took much time to assimilate the impressions that I would fashion into memories and into aesthetic register: she was flesh and human, new to me, unique, multifarious and exciting. The smooth sweep of her eyes across some field of vision that included some part of me in the vista or the slow trickle of sweat, the tiny drop set loose from her shoulder, breaking free in the tiny, shiny track toward her breast yet avoiding its height for the slide down toward ribs. Yet while they are organs of jealous emotion, her feet are also plainly the organs of motivation. They are the carnal tools that propel her toward and away, toward some telos with some purpose, then and again, and then quite distinctly at other times, away, and on to other paths. They are the physical fact of human movement and the flesh that enables departure and that imparts life’s journeys. When I hold her right foot close to my eyes and trace its surface with my fingers, and when I do the same with the left, I am faced with her very flesh that can, for example, carry her from me. There are toes of wondering, an arch of solitude, and a sole of leaving. Or then again, there are is the ankle Latin rhythm, a callous of hiking, or an instep of treading water. The parts of her feet are aspects of her movement just as they are elements of her flesh, each part whole and part of the whole body. Their surface is a history and a threat, or at once an indication and an invitation: for the surface and shape and substance of feet are her story up to now, the delight at the moment, and a whole collection of potential paths tomorrow. Thus jealousy. Or at least as close as I can come to that emotion. But jealousy, because her feet are such stories of a life apart from me. And too because they are the constant means available for her to run, which is always potentially, a running from me. The feet do not inspire fear of loss or sadness at a future breakup. They do not outline my love with the counter sense of envy or intimidation either. They do, however, inspire the potential for jealousy, with its yellow, twisted imitation of desire. Perhaps what I identify as the potential for this emotion is what the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, recognizes as its attempt. In “An Attempt at Jealousy,” she traces the emotional response in regards to a loss of a beloved, a beloved who has moved on to another lover. In the attempt at arousing jealousy, she asks, perhaps rhetorically, how is the new relationship and then links poetically to the motion and sea of memory: How is your life with the other one, Simpler, isn’t it? One stroke of the oar then a long coastline, and soon even the memory of me will be a floating island (in the sky, not on the waters): As the poem continues, she pushes toward jealousy by a depiction, and a hyperbole of the self: How do you live with one of thousand women after Lilith? Sated with newness, are you? Finally the poem concludes, perhaps as the attempt at jealousy itself concludes, with a futile lashing out and a most sad affirmation of loss: Now you are grown cold to magic, how is your life with an earthly woman, without a sixth sense? Tell me: are you happy? Not? In a shallow pit How is your life, my love? Is it as hard as mine with another man? Marina Tsvetaeva wrote of arousing a particular emotional response in the early part of the twentieth-century, in the early days of the Soviet Union. I call up her poetry now as I write of my beloved’s feet and as I reflect on the response those feet evoke in me: jealousy from a man not jealous. Tsvetaeva’s attempt to arouse that particular and spiked response failed: it seems to me so. I turn again and again to the poet voice that articulates that attempt to arouse, and I am faced with a sad woman looking at her own loss and at her own self. And it is loss that so inspires the futile attempt, for it is clear that the departure of the beloved, from one plane to the other, from one city to the next, or from one’s self to another’s, is a terrible fact to face. The parting is of the sort John Donne could not have conceived when he forbade his beloved to mourn his absence. Since for Donne, love was a love divine, absence from another’s body was carnal and insignificant and guided by the moon. But for Tsvetaeva, the loss of the beloved means the loss of love itself, and absence is such an emotionally tearing thrust. At the turn of the first millennium to the second, Moorish Spain was the cultural center of Europe for matters from mathematics to romantic love. Then and there in Córdoba, the prolific writer Ibn Hazm wrote but a single treatise on love, El collar de la paloma, The Ring of the Dove. In Chapter two, “Sobre las señales del amor,” “On the Signs of Love,” Ibn Hazm describes separation from his beloved in a manner that recalls both the emotional attempt by Tsvetaeva and my love’s feet as well: Cuando me voy de tu lado, mis pasos son como los del pirsionero a quien llevan al suplicio. Al ir a ti, corro como la luna llena cuando atraviesa los confines del cielo. Pero, al partir de ti, lo hago con la morosidad con que se mueven las altas estrellas fijas. When I go from your side, my steps are like the prisoner’s taken to be punished. Going to you, I run like the full moon crossing the confines of heaven. But when I leave you, I do so with that same morseness that moves the high, fixed stars When I hold Ada’s feet in my hands and run my palms over their surface, I touch the record of her movement. I trace the stories of flight and dance and tiresome walking. I come to feel the shape of skin surface over bone and ligament that has taken her forward and back, and has moved her from point to point in the dark ages before I knew her. I love her for this. I can take her little toe, the one on the left foot I think now, and circumscribe completely and physically, an element of her story, the flesh bit that knew place and moment and direction as well. That tiny toe can fit in my grasp in an instant and yet defies any containment I could attempt, for it is the skin of motion, the flesh of movement. I take one toe, or perhaps I grab the heel in the cup between my thumb and forefinger, and I hold what is living body and what is live moment. An impossible task, I know, but I can and do. That she has history I cannot wish otherwise, nor wish different the smallest speck of dust she has traversed, for the story she has lived has taken her to my arms this moment. How could I want anything other? And so, I am driven to jealousy, as close as a man not jealous can come. For her foot is an organ of departure, of leaving and flight and motion for long distances. I take her foot by my hand, my thumb pressing the middle of her sole, my fingers wrapped over the skin covered bones and tendons that lead from her toes to her ankle: I hold that foot. In this moment I hold her firmly, and I thank god. I hold this female flesh that has traveled far and that chooses to rest with me this evening. Yet well I know, her foot could move from me in a future moment. How could the possibility not be so? And for that I am driven to jealousy, jealous of an organ of the flesh that could cause her to depart. My grasp is loving and is present. I take her foot and I am filled with something of wonder and something of fear.                vagina Of her body, this is the delta. The region of my love’s body, the V from the pubic mound to the union of her sex’s lines, is the secret region of her delta. I am sure that since I am a man and from such an arid home, it strikes me so. Her sex is the delta of her life flow: sexual, menstrual, and natal. It is the delta of a great river for a man who knows only desert or sea. It fans out in flesh the color of sand with the relentless push of fresh water down to the salt bay, the gulf, the ocean. I cannot take my eyes from its fact when she reveals herself to me, for I am driven by a deep thirst. My love’s sex is a region of river and sand, a zone in the shape of the Greek letter delta, the sign for change. From my desert and from my sea, I look on with a deep thirst and a curiosity and a wonder, for there she is, in motion, a flow toward change, and an offer. At times Ada reclines, extends her arms to me, beckoning me to the delta. At other times, she stands before me, back to me, presses into me, and places my hand on her pubic hair, and I trace the V. And sometimes we lay side by side facing, but one’s head to the other’s toes, and I sense her changing river’s delta with my eyes closed. At these times and at so many others, I am made aware of how she differs from me and of how much I thirst for her. The V of pubic mound and vagina, with its weather, its moods, with its drive, present themselves to me at all these moments as facts of her being and as shadow of mine. For in this part of her body that is so different than mine, I find proof of the impossibility of a union that words and eyes try to realize. Her delta is change. It is not only the change of the motion of life, but it is also the immobile change of difference. Ada’s vagina is the fact and demonstration that she can never be mine or me, that she is forever another, beyond me, breathing her own air, expressing sex her own way. Her delta is the proof. And yet it is an oasis: across the smooth sand, the site of lush life and the place to satisfy an eternal thirst. Her sex is mound and lips and fleshy surface, simultaneously forever different and endlessly appealing. I flatter myself, I know, but her shape is the exact and perfect receptacle of mine, and there I quench as much as I thirst. The delta of her sex that proves her separateness and that makes our union possible seems to me to be explained in the Mayan concept, “in lak’ esh,” “you are my other self.” Ada’s vagina is nothing like my penis and is proof that we are forever different, separate, individual. And yet it lures and fits and holds me in the act that comes the closest I know to erasing my loneliness. The act of sex, when I penetrate her delta I loose myself and get lost in her breathing and gasps and heaves. It is how I confirm myself part of another being, with her then, together like no other. When we touch in the act of sex, we confirm our terrible separateness by cancelling it at the same time. We act expressly human, biologic and instinctual, when we grab to pull each other inside each other. Her delta of different river is my proof that I am alive and that I am me, lost in her arms, her breath, her vagina. Her flesh is my flesh when she seizes my flesh and takes it as if her own. We confirm the act and fact of life in coterminus sweat. She makes me human then, she, my other self.  Ada’s vagina marks the edge of her body where mine crosses over. It is an interface, a border zone, like our mouths and tongues, where we spill out and into each other. It is the carnal edge that we come to cross passionately, selfishly, eagerly, out of breath, in our act of making love. For us “making love” is not merely a euphemism for sex; for us making sex coincides with making amor. There is the painful touch and the being touched of souls and the insane abandon at the centers of our selves. The dark skin of her moist vaginal lips and the bright, soft peak of her clitoris are the flesh of human transformation: frightening because I lose myself, wildly satisfying because I am found. Hers is the flesh of crossing, the delta her river transverses to my gulf. We cross that area together in a magic act of making ourselves truly human. We have sex while we make love. Essentially what we do is make life, in body and in the breath of emotion. The cross over the delta or over the river is always to another, to an unknown, always impossibly deferred from ourselves. My love’s vagina is the flesh of bipolar desire; she is selfish in her giving and most generous in her taking. And I am too, in my own way, with my own configuration of flesh coming against hers. We strive and take and come to know the terrible gulf of separation in our joy. One writer whose work grasped at describing the pull of desire to bridge the impossible is the Québecoise poet, Marie Uguay. In L’outre-vie she grappled with the possibility of desire to cross the bounders of selves separated by difference, by life, by death: L’outre-vie c’est quand on n’est pas encore dans la vie, qu’on la regarde, que l’on cherche à y entrer. On n’est pas morte mais déjà presque vivante, presque née, en train de naître peut-être, dans ce passage hors frontière et hors temps qui caractérise le désir. Désir de l’autre, désir du monde. Que la vie jaillisse comme dans une outre gonflée. Et l’on est encore loin. L’outre-vie comme l’outre-mer ou l’outre-tombe. Il faut traverser la rigidité des évidences, des préjugés, des peurs, des habitudes, travreser le réel obtus pour entrer dans une réalité à la fois plus douloureuse et plus plaisante, dans l’inconnu, le secret, le contradictoire, ouvrir ses sens et connaître. Traverser l’opacité du silence et inventer nos existences, nos amours, là où il n’y a plus de fatalité d’aucune sorte.