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Deflores. What makes your lip so strange? This must not be betwixt us. Beatrice. The man talks wildly. Deflores. Come kisse me with a zeal now. Beatrice. Heaven I doubt him. Deflores. I will not stand so long to beg 'em shortly. Beatrice. Take heed Deflores of forgetfulness, 'twill soon betray us. Deflores. Take you heed first; Faith y'are grown much forgetfull, y'are to blame in't. Beatrice. He's bold, and I am blam'd for't. Deflores. I have eas'd you of your trouble, think on't, I'me in pain, And must be as'd of ou; 'tis a charity, Justice invites your blood to understand me. Beatrice. I dare not. Deflores. Quickly. Beatrice. Oh I never shall, speak if yet further of that I may lose What has been spoken, and no sound remain on't. would not hear so much offence again for such another deed. Deflores. Soft, Lady, soft; the last is not yet paid for, oh this act Has put me into spirit; I was as greedy on't As the parcht earth of moisture when the clouds weep. Did you ot mark, I wrought my self into't. Nay sued, and kneel'd for't: Why was all that pains took? You see I have thrown contempt upon your gold, Not that I want it, for I doe piteously, In order I will come unto't, and make use on't, But 'twas not held so pretious to begin with; For I place wealth after the heels of pleasure, And where I not resolv'd in my belief That thy virginity were perfect in thee, I should but take my recompense with grudging, As if I had but halfe my hopes I agreed for. Beatrice. Why 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked, Or shelter such a cunning cruelty, To make his death the murderer of my honor. Thy language is so bold and vitious, I cannot see which way I can forgive it with any modesty. Deflores. Push, you forget your selfe, a woman dipt in blood, and talk of modesty. Beatrice. O misery of sin! would I had been bound Perpetually unto my living hate In that Piracquo, then to hear these words. Think but upon the distance that Creation Set 'twixt thy blood and mine, and keep thee there. Deflores. Look but into your conscience, read me there, 'Tis a true Book, you'l find me there your equall: Push, flye not to your birth, but settle you In what the act has made you, y'are no more now, You must forget your parentage to me, Y'are the deeds creature, by that name You lost your first condition, and I challenge you, As peace and innocency has turn'd you out, And made you one with me. Beatrice. With thee, foul villain? Deflores. Yes, my fair murdress; Do you urge me? Though thou wri'st maid, thou whore in thy affection, 'Twas chang'd from thy first love, and that's a kind Of whoredome in thy heart, and he's chang'd now, To bring thy second on the Alsemero, Whom 'by all sweets that ever darkness tasted, If I enjoy thee not thou ne're enjoyst, I'le blast the hopes and joyes of marriage, I'le confess all, my life I rate at nothing. Beatrice. Deflores. Deflores. I shall rest from all lovers plagues then, I live in pain now: that shooting eye Will burn my heart to cinders. Beatrice. O sir, hear me. Deflores. She that in life and love refuses me, In death and shame my partner she shall be. Beatrice. Stay, hear me once for all, I make thee master Of all the wealth I have in gold and jewels, Let me go poor unto my bed with honor, And i am rich in all things. Deflores. Let this silence thee, The wealth of all Valentia shall not buy my pleasure from me, Can you weep Fate from its determin'd purpose? So soon may weep me. Beatrice. Vengeance begins; Murder I see is followed by more sins. Was my creation in the womb so curst, It must ingender with a Viper first? Deflores. Come, rise, and shrowd your blushes in my bosome, Silence is one of pleasures best receipts: Thy peace is wrought for ever in this yeelding. 'Lasse how the Turtle pants! Thou'lt love anon, What thou so fear'st, and faintst to venture on. Exeunt. (Act III, scene iv) Enter Deflores bringing in Beatrice Deflores. Here we are, if you have any more To say to us, speak quickly, I shall not, Give you the hearing else, I am so stout yet, and so I think that broken rib of mankind. Vermandero. An Host of enemies entred my Citadell, Could not amaze like this,Joanna, Beatrice, Joanna. Beatrice. O come not neer me sir, I shall defile you, I am that of your blood was taken from you For your better health, look no more upon't, But cast it to the ground regardlessly, Let the common shewer take it from distinction, Beneath the starres, upon yon Meteor Ever hang my fate, 'mongst things corruptible, I ne're could pluck ti from him, my loathing Was Prophet to the rest, but ne're believ'd Mine honour fell with him, and now my life. Alsemero, I am a stranger to your bed, Your bed was coz'ned on the nuptiall night, For which your false-bride died. Alfermero. Diaphanta? Deflores. Yes, and the while I coupled with your mate At barly-break; now we are left in hell. Vermandero. We are all there, it circumscribes here. Deflores. I lov'd this woman in spite of her heart, Her love I earn'd out of Piracquos murder. Tomaso. Ha, my brothers murtherer. Deflores. Yes, and her honors prize Was my reward, I thank life for nothing But that pleasure, it was so sweet to me, That I have drunk up all, left none behinde, For any man to pledge me. (Act V, scene iii)

Turning your back, you button your blouse. That’s new. You redirect the conversation. A man has entered it. Your therapist has given you permission to discuss this with me, the word you’ve been looking for in desire. You can now say “heterosexual” with me. We mean different things when we say it. I mean the life I left behind forever. For you, it’s a new beginning, a stab at being normal again, a desire to enter the world with a man instead of a woman, and of course, there’s the word you won’t claim for yourself anymore, you who have children to think of, you who have put me in line behind them and mean to keep the order clear. It’s really my word against yours anymore in this new language, in this battle over how a man is about to enter this closed room of desire we’ve gingerly exchanged keys to, but desire isn’t what’s at issue anyway, you say to me. Instead I learn a man can protect you in a way a woman only means to but never can, and my world is too new when there’s real life out there, word after word for how normal looks, each word cutting like scissors a profile of desire— a man facing a woman, nothing particularly new or interesting to me. I’ve wanted only to face you and the world simultaneously, say what I mean with my body, my choice to not be a man, to be a woman with you, forget the man’s part or how his body is the word for what touch can contain, what love means. If this were only about desire, you say, I’d still desire you. But it isn’t passion we’re defining, new consequences emerge when a man and desire are part of the words we hurl, you changing how you mean loving—this terrible final news.

I have a twin who bears my name; Bears it about with him in shame; Who goes a way I would not go; Has knowledge of things I would not know; When I was brave he was afraid; He told the truth, I lied; What’s sweet to me tastes bitter to him; My friends, my friends, he doesn’t love them; I walk the daylight in his dream; He breathes the air of my nightmare.

Rocked in my mother’s pregnant amble, and born into forty-five years in the dark, the egg this child was also swayed in the arts of lovers I took before you, fed with me in the public markets of Baltimore and Denpasar on oysters and rambutan, woke with me each year to new waves of wander, fish and flower, liqueur of each region, and bread of each village, each cup of moonlight in the long sward between my window and the Wannsee. The egg he was heard and voices of everyone I desired and held itself in some deep hormonal bloom, taking whatever was remarkable in my life into its possibility. We learned not to hurry in Balinese rain, to listen for the rumble of wild boar in the Malvan woods. We climbed into planes bound for cities we’d never visit again and skin we’d summon with sobbing. And so, my husband, as you dream of owning this child, remember that he has ridden in my fire, bathed in my blood, and sipped at the breath I drew the first time I saw what Rodin had clawed from stone before he turned from Claudel and went home for dinner and a clean shirt. Remember that this child is collage of everything before you, frangipani and escargot, five-for-a-dollar boxes of macaroni, and French cherries from an old woman in Auvergne who insisted on the gift because it was so marvelous to see a woman traveling alone.

There is a garden in her face Where roses and white lilies blow; A heavenly paradise is that place, Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow: There cherries grow which none may buy Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry. Those cherries fairly do enclose Of orient pearl a double row, Which when her lovely laughter shows, They look like rose-buds filled with snow; Yet them no peer nor prince can buy Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry. Her eyes like angels watch them still; Her brows like bended bows do stand, Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill All that attempt with eye or hand Those sacred cherries to come nigh, Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.

Child of a day, thou knowest not The tears that overflow thy urn, The gushing eyes that read thy lot, Nor, if thou knewest, couldst return! And why the wish! the pure and blest Watch like thy mother o'er thy sleep. O peaceful night! O envied rest! Thou wilt not ever see her weep.

Our sorrow had neither place nor carrier-away, and dared not hover over the child whose breath opened as transom of a frail house. Nor could we put our sorrow in the dictionary, for ghastliness already shot out its own defining in rags of fired light. Pigeons would not sleek it over their dirty coats, nor fly sorrow against the aviary's sharp fence. Each day bridgeless, each night birdless, all the nocturnals needless at the expanse of our nightwatch. But wake at the moon, we could, mumbling,are we in a horror show?—inside of sleep our shock-white minds caught on reels where a child's body breaks the heart and the mother can't know if she counts as a mother. I don't know if the child heard what wept at the bedside, orderlies snapping smelling salts from chalky bullets against all the mothers falling, all the fathers under what each branch let down: there's a hidden weight to snow.

A little black thing among the snow, Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe! "Where are thy father and mother? say?" "They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil'd among the winter's snow, They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, Who make up a heaven of our misery."

After “Exile’s Letter” by Ezra Pound To Tom S. of Missouri, possum friend, clerk at Lloyd’s. Now I remember that you rang a silent bell By the foot of the bridge at the River “Thames.” With dull roots and dried tubers, you wrote poems and laments And grew more English month on month, bowing to kings and princes. Americans came drifting in from the sea and from the west border, And with them, and with me especially Everything was pig-headed, And I made hay from poppycock and painted adjectives, Just so we could start a new fellowship, And we all escaped our personalities, without expressing them. And then I was sent off to Rapallo, trailed by children, And you to your desk at Faber-Faber, Till we had nothing but China and silence in common. And then, when modernism had come to its worst, We wrote, and published in Po-Etry, Through all the one hundred kinds of shy and whispering silence, Into a poem of a thousand blank pages, That was the first heave; And into ten thousand poems full of Chinese reticence. And with chafing saddle and the bit in his mouth Out from the East came Confucius and his philosophy, And there came also the “True-man” Ben-it-o to awe me, Playing in the death-mask of Jefferson. In the botched houses of Europe they gave us more foetid music, Clanging instruments, like the sound of a myriad dying. My forefather Confucius got me drunk and I danced because my savage mind wouldn’t keep still Without his music playing, And I, wrapped in silence, woke up with my head on his lap, And my voice returning to me from every radio, And before the end of the broadcast we scattered like cards, or bombs, I had to be off to China, so far across my desktop, You back to your London-bridge. And our Roosevelt, who was brave as a rodent, Was president in Washing Town, and let in the usurious rabble. And one May he sent the soldiers for me, despite the long distance. And what with broken idols and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going, Over roads twisted like my brain’s folds. And I was still going, late in the war, with defeat blowing in from the North, Not guessing how little I knew of the cost, and how soon I would be paying it. And what a reception: Steel cages, two books set on a packing-crate table, And I was caught, and had no hope of escaping. And you would walk out with me to the northeast corner of my cell, Toward the Alpine peak, with clouds about it as foul as London air, With you whispering,and with a bang, not a whimper, With glasses like dinner plates, glowing grass-green in the darkness, Pleasure-fasting, with women, coming and going without speech, With the dandruff-flakes falling like snow, And the hyacinth girls eating lunch in silence, And the sea, knee-deep, reflecting white eyebrows — Eyebrows turned white are an awful sight in the sunlight, Hideously aged — And the sea-girls singing back at us, Drowning in seaweed brocade, And the wind twisting the song, and desiccating it, Covering our eyes with dust. And this is the way the world ends. With a bang, not with a whimper. I went up to the court for prosecution, Tried standing mute, offered a madman’s song, And got no conviction, and went back to Saint Elizabeths Committed. And once again, later, you stood at the foot of my bed, And then the visit ended, you went back to Bloomsbury, And if you ask if I recall that parting: It is like the hair falling from my hieratic head, Confused ... Whirl! Centripetal! Mate! What is the use of talking, until I end my song, I end my song in the dark. I call in the nurse, Hold the pill in my hand As she says, “Take this,” And swallow it down, silent.

Velvet fruit, exquisite square I hold up to sniff between finger and thumb - how you numb me with your rich attentions! If I don't eat you quickly, you'll melt in my palm. Pleasure seeker, if i let you you'd liquefy everywhere. Knotted smoke, dark punch of earth and night and leaf, for a taste of you any woman would gladly crumble to ruin. Enough chatter: I am ready to fall in love!