ART-ZINE REFLECT


REFLECT... КУАДУСЕШЩТ # 14 ::: ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


Joseph MILLS. TWENTY-NINE WAYS OF MAKING LOVE



aвтор визуальной работы - Photo by V.Kupriianov, idea by Iu.Proskuriakov.



And the first time we made love, when she first moved to kiss me, when her face drew close to mine, when she parted her lips and tilted her head to the left or to the right, the universe shrank to that small space. The hard edge of her cheekbone seemed to be the line of the horizon, slipping nearer.
And the next time we made love everything is soft, hushed, everything is faint, sketched in pencil and painted in pastel watercolors, and the dew is everywhere, settling on everything, and then the shiver, the wonderful, shiver up the spine.
And one night we make love and there is a delicious moment in the half-darkness of her room, in the room with the little brown sparrows flying in a phalanx on her wallpaper, when her flower-print dress falls away for the first time and the rustle of her dress is the only sound in a silent world, and it is as if a painting is being unveiled for dignitaries with champagne flutes clutched in their trembling hands, and the white flowers of her dress fill the small room with their fragrance as they fall, pale petals raining around her feet, and her arms are crossed over her breasts in shyness, and a sudden sensation of weightlessness comes over me as if the floor is dropping away from beneath my feet, and then we are both falling and we are falling into one another’s arms and against the wall and into bed, we are falling together into love.
One night we make love and when we kiss our kisses get tangled up in our smiles, because we were both so happy and in love that our lips simply can’t decide which they’d rather do.
One night we make love and as she removes her stockings I can see the marks left across her thighs by the tight elastic, the shallow ridge of pink against white. I run my finger along it, as if along the rim of a wineglass.
One night we make love and in the morning she is bashful, a stranger again, embarrassed by her nudity and bad breath, trying to hide her unshaven legs and birthmarks.
But one night we make love and when she stands naked before me she is as naked as an angel, naked from head to toe and from nose to navel. In her open mouth I see her naked tongue reclining, and when she smiles I see each tooth standing naked, pale and shivering, and I see her open eyes stare, naked to the air, unblinking.
One night she stands naked before me and she is naked like a Greek statue is naked, which is not to say perfect but to say replete with content, revealing ideas and cultures in her bare pink thighs crossed and uncrossed, expounding philosophies with her hard nipples, carrying politics in one pendulous breast and aesthetics in the other, and I am ashamed to stand across from her, no more than naked in my nakedness, shivering and thin.
And one night we make love and I witness the bliss that moves across the surface of her skin, washing its way in a great wave from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head, and know that for her at that moment I am blessed to be the source and the instrument of bliss, eyes open wide and watching as everything moves with one bright surge through everything else in creation, watching as towers shake and bridges snap, continents crumble into dust and oceans burst forth into flame, and there are no words to describe what it is to witness her all at once with a shudder disappearing backwards into the depths of her self, her eyes rolling back, blind beneath her lids, embracing herself with her own long arms, devouring herself with her own red mouth, like the serpent that, swallowing its tail, encircles the world.
And one night we make love and we know at once that this love is destined to be a love of biblical proportions, for this love is Old Testament fire and brimstone love, and the law of this love is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, it’s the Burning Bush and Sodom and Gomorrah and the parting of the Red Sea, and she makes me speak in tongues and see the Holy Ghost, and when she touches me I hear the voice of God and it’s a low moan and a sigh, sultry, deep and thick with lust, it’s whispering sweet nothings and talking dirty, and I love it when she straddles me in the daylight, when she raises herself over me, with her dove white skin, her dove soft flesh and soft dove eyes, and I love it when she twists above me in the daylight like a pillar of cloud, and I love it when she straddles me at night, when she arches her back above me, when with flushed face and wild hair she burns above me like a pillar of fire as she leads me straight to the Promised Land.
One night we make love and I kiss her on all of her least hospitbl parts. Avoiding the soft comfort of breasts and cheeks and thighs, I lavish my attention on her bony knees, her hard knobs of her ankles, the sharp points of her elbows. In this way I tell her: this is love.
One night we make love and afterwards she tells me “When I fell in love for the first time I fell in love fallen on my knees. Тhen I was a girl I used to be in love with the crucifix that hung over the altar in my church. I used to have a huge crush on Jesus because he was beautiful and weak and strong all at once, and I think that the Jesus on my church’s crucifix must have been modeled on a fifties matinee idol in order to bring in the teenagers, he had dimples and a cleft chin like a young Kirk Douglas, and in church every Sunday I used to tune out the sermon and spend my time imagining that he was my boyfriend, and oh I loved the way his body looked so smooth and hard, and the way his wounds made him look so tough, his face was so sad that I wanted to kiss it, smooth away his worries from his eyes with kisses, his long hair was sexy hanging in his eyes, and it looked like his loincloth was about to fall off and drop to the floor, what a scandal that would have been, and my grandmother used to say that Jesus was the only man in history who ever stood exactly six feet high, everybody else was either a little too short or a little too tall, she used to say that his body was perfect, that his love was perfect, and I used to get dizzy imagining what a perfect lover would be like, and I couldn’t wait for the second coming because I was sure that somehow we’d see each other across a crowded room and fall in love, imagine that, Jesus and me at a cocktail party, and in church when everybody sang hymns I’d be worrying about what his last name was, and whether I’d be Mrs. Christ, or Mrs. Gallilie, or even Mrs. Carpenter, I used to blush taking communion it seemed so dirty and sexual to swallow his body and his blood, and at night when I prayed at the foot of my bed my prayers were all like love letters, and my god how I used to wish that I could soak them with perfume.”
One night we make love and at the library the next day I go through every copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy that sit on the shelves, crossing out Beatrice and penciling in her name instead.
We spend a day at the zoo and, inspired, hurry home to make love like two golden lions panting in jungle heat, and like two eagles tumbling together through midair and making love in the midst of azure skies, cumulus clouds and sunshine, and like salmon swimming upstream against impossible currents, and like dolphins whistling ultrasonic sweet nothings into one another’s ears, and we make love like a pair of mangy alley cats, with the scruff of her neck clenched tight in my teeth, and we make love after the manner of the praying mantis, with my head snipped off at the very moment of ecstatic climax and joy, and we make love in precise imitation of every last creature known to man, mimicking the amorous underwater acrobatics of the blue whale and the mating dance of the smallest amoebae splitting itself down the middle with a sigh, until our bed was a virtual Noah’s arc of creatures paired off two by two and ready to weather apocalypses and floods for the sake of love, ready to repopulate whole worlds through the strength and ingenuity of sweet desire.
One night in the heat of the summer, when the thought of another’s touch is unbearable, we devise elaborate new ways to make love, learning out of necessity to make love coldly and dispassionately, like strangers or scientists, like accountants, like a couple that has been unhappily married for forty years, and we teach one another to make love from across the room, kissing each other’s bodies with the low long distance hum of the telephone wire and the click-clack of telegrams, exchanging caresses via sign language and bright-flagged semaphore, learning to make love like lighthouses make love to ships at sea, like satellites make love to television sets, like telescopes make love to starlight, learning, that is, to make love at a distance.
One night we make love and in the darkness afterwards we trace words upon each others bodies, writing with our fingertips upon each others skin and seeing if one could read and understand what the other wrote, decipher the code of touch transposed into language and into touch once again, writing secret messages too hidden for our eyes to read them, upon skin stretched as taught and pale as paper: I Heart You, You’re Sweet, Be Mine. I am Lonely. I Do Not Want to Hurt You. I am Afraid. I am Afraid of Hurting You. I Am Terrified of Love.
And one night we make love simply by touching, simply by pressing her skin against mine, and when my hands move across her they are like Barishnikov and Nijinsky, and her long legs are prima ballerinas in tutus and toe-shoes, and my fingers leap across her body like a stage and her legs do pirouettes, and she touches me with hands like feathers, as gently as if her arms were a swallow’s wings, and the care and delicacy with which she touches me makes me feel fragile and expensive, and she touches me with hands that must have invisible eyes on their palms and on their fingertips, so precise and knowing is their touch, and she touches me with hands that are softer than the pressure of her breath, and when she moves her hands across me it is as if she moves instead her lips and her lungs to touch me with the weight of air across my chest and stomach and forearm and elbow and wrist and shoulder and throat, and she touches me so softly that everything in the world grows curved, curvaceous, smooth, develops child-bearing hips and breasts, and when she touches me like that suddenly four-cornered rooms have no corners, and diamonds are suddenly pearls, and when she lays her palms upon me serious square maps are remade into spinning globes, and, when she touches me, she touches me so softly that the sharp kid at the head of the class is all at once a dullard, while, on every dinner tbl in every restaurant in the world, forks are suddenly spoons, and windows are portholes, and footballs are basketballs, and ice skates are clumsy snow shoes, and Rubik’s Cubes are Hula-Hoops, and every word in the Oxford English Dictionary that used to be spelled with a jagged Z is now spelled with the rounded contours of an S, and when she touches me like that this world is suddenly so soft and smooth that even Abe Lincoln, Karl Marx, and Moses wake up in the morning clean-shaven, and in return I press myself between her two breasts that are so much like snow banks that they make me shiver, and I press myself into the smooth hard flesh of the yellow soles of her feet, and I press myself against the silk of her throat, and I press myself against the goose-feather pillow of her belly, and I seek out the narrow space between one rib and the next, and I rub myself across the rough palms of her working class hands, and across the noble and aristocratic height of her forehead, and along the shy fold of flesh that hides behind her knee, and among the perfumed down of her armpits, and along the ivory pillar of her spine, and against her shoulder blades that if she were an angel would surely be bright wings, and I press myself into the minuscule pores of her skin, struggling towards the secret hidden warmth of her, penetrating and impregnating each crevice and valley of her, working my way diligently even into the narrow seams between two molecules, down even into the crevice of light that marks the boundary line between one atom and the next, frantic with longing and desperate with love.
And one night I crawled inside of her and made love to her from the inside out, because I was as much in love with the hidden interior beauty of her body as I was with its surface, because I dreamed of seeing revealed her body’s complex hidden architecture, its corridors and spiral staircases and vaulted ceilings, and I was ecstatic at the thought of her thousands of miles of unexplored blood vessels waiting to be mapped and adored, and the dark sheen of her unseen kidneys, and the uncountbl branchings and interweavings of her bronchial tubes, the twin birds nests of her lungs, and the intricate knots of her tendons and ligaments like ribbons waiting to be untied, and her bones standing white like glasses of milk, tall and cool, and the recently consumed breakfasts and lunches and dinners stacked neatly in her stomach, and the electric golden ash of her ninety million neurons to be counted and kissed, that swarmed like fireflies with her every thought.
And one night the television played an old movie in the next room as we argued, yelled, sobbed, and screamed, and I remember seeing Cary Grant kiss Doris Day out of the corner of my eye, leaning over her sweetly with Golden Age of Hollywood tenderness, and as the music swelled ironically I walked into the next room scowling just to switch it off, and I knew that we were still in love, because, even against our will, our worst fights were saturated with kisses.
And one night in the middle of an argument she hurled a book at my head and it was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
And one night she took a swing at me and punched me right on the kisser.
And one night she wept on the bed and over the bed hung her poster of Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss, the lovers’ faces hidden in each other and her own face hidden in the shelter of the pillow, and as she wept on the bed I felt so cruel that I didn’t know what to do except to hate her and to hate myself for hating her, and to despise her even more for making me hate her, and so I kissed the soles of her feet and her ankles, not simply to make amends, but to humiliate myself to the point where there was nothing I could do but secretly vow to myself all the while that some day soon I’d make her pay.
One night we lunge at each other like dogs after bones.
One night we make love until her breath falls out of her mouth in broken pieces, like glass.
One night we make love not with kisses but with flying plates and kitchen knives, with brass knuckles and black jacks. We make love with sticks of dynamite and samurai swords.
One night we make love and the violence of our love becomes reassuring, because I know very well that strangers never hurt one other so badly. Never with the same frantic intensity, the same deliberate cruelty, our bruised rib cages expanding and contracting with ragged breaths, our fingers twisted in each other’s hair. When we make love we are possessed with a rage.
One night we make love and I am frightened that I might kill her outright, crush the life out of her with my body and my hands, and I know that perhaps the only reason that I fail to do so is that death would not have be violent enough. Death would be quiet and still.
One night we make love and her body is almost motionless, and the motionless expression on her face is like the eye at the center of a storm. When I look into her eyes I see that the mind that moves behind them is motionless and still. I remember the exhaustion, the weakness. Her skin is smooth, frictionless, as if polished. I remember her labored breathing, her expression that was like that on an animal. A face worn by an appetite.
And the last night that we make love our love turns into pain and the pain is exciting and it turns into love and then back into pain once more, sometimes so quickly that I cannot draw a clear line between them, until at last both the pain and the love disappear. They turn into each other so quickly that, like the propeller of an airplane, they blur into invisibility. When this happens I feel a sensation that I cannot name, a sensation that is neither pain nor love, but which surpasses them both, and, for this sensation which I cannot name, I am willing to trade my love. I am willing to trade both my love and my pain.



следующая Шэрон ОЛДС. САТАНА СКАЗАЛ
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предыдущая Эва КАСАНСКИ. СЕКС И ДРУГИЕ ТАЙНЫЕ ИГРЫ






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