whisper

You whisper incantations without moving your lips. It conjures me, drawing me in, unsure if I heard you make a sound. Meanwhile, your spells take effect. I am danced by a rhythm played by the pulse of your blood rushing through your veins. I am swayed across the floor by the cascading of your hair as it shifts behind your shoulder with the turn of your head.

From a glass box, pantomime a caress. Across the room you see me shutter and turn, affected by just the air you stirred.

Do not set foot on the immaculately smooth fallen snow of my skin and mar it. Instead kneel on the stoop, exhale as carefully as a prayer. That one breath is the birth of spring. Molecule after molecule melts the snow as each tells the other the tale of your closeness.

My body is a cauldron that you hold your hands over. It boils and bubbles and leaps towards your fingers. “Not yet” you both chide and promise as your hands lift further away.

You watch the mercury line of yearning rise in my eyes. You feel it too. We didn’t come here to cash out a small jackpot. It’s more than a body can hold. Yearning spills out into the room, soaking everything, rising till the bed floats. We are weightless and submerged, swimming through the world of yearning we created.

Your hand grazing my hand breaks the surface. We take in a long breath, one we didn’t know for certain would come.

You reach for me again then pause.

That butterfly flap crosses the globe of the small universe we created and crashes into me like a wave. You can make love to me with a blink of your eyelids. You turn me inside out with a twitch of your finger. Let’s leave constant frantic motion for the children. I want to meet in the realm of the sorcerers and play with more subtle and powerful tools.

You stand above me, musing on weather patterns, calling the sun and moon to rise and set as my body flaps like an unhooked flag. You are delighted to find that when you stand still the wind keeps blowing, your hair whips around your face as the gusts increase. You don’t need to be in motion to create motion. In stillness each action reverberates.

I chose you for your ear, because you know the room stops echoing long after the last beat of the drum. Only I don’t want to be beaten or played. I’m far too precious for that & my skin is unstretched, untaned. I want to be moved like sand dunes, one grain at a time over hundreds of years. I want to be worried smooth as a volcanic stone in a creek bed. I want to be adorned with dust like a cobweb in the corner that reveals itself slowly and then, once exposed, becomes the victim of it’s own weight. I want to be haunted by the slight chill of the sun dipping behind a cloud on an early fall day. I want the heaviness of the moist air halfway down the basement stairs. Those are the ways I’d like to be touched.

When you call, don’t speak, just breathe.

When you come to my doorway, don’t enter.

When you cross my threshold do so with just a toe that you tap…. tap…. place and then retract.

Think about leaving.

Turn to leave.

Pause.

Decide to stay and when you turn back around it will be into my open palm that clasps you by the throat and pulls you in, consumes you so quickly that you don’t have time to be afraid.