April 6: Countries of the Body

"There's a place that poets seek
as real and fearsome as the body."
- Tishani Doshi

Tishani - may I call you that? - I need you to know,
I'm in constant conversation with your words, how
you delicately string them together with silk, hang
them to dry under red sunsets and mist of memory.
How your words wrench me from myself, future and past,
here and now, space and time. How your words transcend.
Your every line captivates me, but nothing so much
as when you called the first collection of poetry,
Countries of the Body - oh, how to explain to you
the shivers in the various continents, the swaying forests,
the revolutions, the silhouettes of truth, the trembling restlessness
that arose in the cities of my belly - how could you
coin a phrase so beautiful, and then put it out in the world
so it would reach me, wrench out my regret and lay it
to dry under the stars, touch me in places I didn't even know
existed - how could you?

I've been wondering for years now - what is art? - and
I understand that it must transcend representation alone.
And yet, with a pen in my hand, all I want to translate from
the shadowy world of images is the body - the poetry of it,
the misty mystery of it, the shadow smoke and concrete curves
of it. How the universe could really exist in a single mind, and
how a mind exists in this separate, almost self-sustaining universe
of a body - how it escapes definition, preservation, categorization.

I want to paint a hundred bodies, have people hold still
while I let my lines caress their corporeality, their mortality.
Flesh, muscle, bone and sinew - the creation of metaphors
began in the body, the realization of metaphors too.
What is as beautiful as skin, skin, stretched tight over
a form you perfected of yourself in so many years,
your errors and misjudgements, your petty joys,
your stories and your rainy days, your memory -
wrapped up so tight, tucked up inside, giftwrapped
with golden-brown, slightly freckled, even toned.
How gorgeous are curves - not only breasts and hips,
but the curves of sensuous arms as they rest against
a wall, catching a single shaft of sunlight against
shadow complexion. Calves and ankles, muscled
with strength and resolve, stray hairs lit up in noon
sunlight, shadow and light entwining until this thing
of beauty is formed in my eyes - who can say all bodies
are not beautiful - close your eyes for a moment and
when you open them, notice only fragments:

the strand of dark hair pushed aside with long fingers,
motionless mouth with contours and crevices, full lips
open against sky. fluttering lids of star-speckled eyes.
undulating plains of thighs. ashy mountains of knees.
twitching ankles. wrinkled hands. mysterious ears.
All bodies are beautiful. All bodies are singular worlds.

One day I want to fall in love with somebody
and name every country of their body. I want to
soak afternoon sun in the ocean and dissolve my
unyielding flesh to the seas. I want to outlive my
corporeal frame. I want to live only as long as it
lasts.