Rebecca Seiferle

the Platonic idea is “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but “the heavenly bed, created by God … a heavenly man, a heavenly dog, a heavenly cat, and so on …” Bertrand Russell We’re not all lesbians at this bar and grill (not yet? not practicing? only in heart?),chiaroscuro as the room is with expensive ambiance and dear cuts of meat and fish overlaid with nouveau fruit sauce, it’s clear that the most manly woman among us, older, wearing cowboy boots and a turquoise bolo, is probably neither entirely straight nor wholly queer. When she begins to confess her ‘secret’— it’s her holding of a piece of land, acres of sweet desert; its muddy roads, its remote sublime have four-wheeled deep into her being. She’s probably someone’s heavenly grandmother, as I’m still someone’s heavenly wife, despite the separation.Appearance does not really appear, but it appears to appear, yet, for a moment, it seems our conversation may open up unexpectedly or shatter into awkwardness over the word girlfriends: who in the rainy summers of our youths, we all played with our girlfriends, (what do I mean by ‘girlfriend?’ what do you mean by yours?) It’s only then, as one of the younger women (the most lovely, so silver with bracelets and earrings and a noticeable ring) laughs that I begin to guess her inclination,Does it really appear to appear, or only apparently appear to appear? It’s a long way from Plato’s symposium to this bar and grill in Arizona. At that ancient feast— whenever a number of individuals have a common name, they have also a common ‘idea’ or ‘form’— only men reclined upon the couches, and the only the love of man for man was love’s ideal, the impulse toward some boyish form becoming the ascension of being to some ever truer realm, as the souls of men became pregnant and gave birth to “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but “the heavenly bed, created by God… a heavenly man, a heavenly dog, a heavenly cat, and so on through a whole Noah’s ark,” but no heavenly woman, much less a heavenly lesbian, for since Aristotle, “Lesbian rule” has meant that measure made of lead so it could be bent to a curved or crooked wall. Because we are all women, how can we speak of love? In the beginning, banished from the realm of discourse, assigned to love’s servitude not its speech, to be love’s body not its tongue, so no one here speaks of her feeling, much less thinks to make it another’s measure. In our mouths, the tongue’s a knife, each word a wild edge, where we stammer only our own wound, a drop of blood sensual on the tongue, a distinctive taste of salt, more mollusk perhaps—wrapped around an I of sand— than pearl, a syllable of milk or nipple, some private body within the body, the you behind your eyes, as if being itself were poetry—passionate with nascent and protean neologism, full of the gaps of being, the oblique richness of a depth in which we begin to glimpse each other, mysterious and solo as we are, black stubborn pearls of being. If we spoke of Plato, and we don’t; each of us was banished from the womb by virtue of having a womb, to this unpredictable realm where each of us would have to discover her self, that wild tongue—never delineated, even in shadow, upon the philosopher’s cave wall.

When Simone Weil said it would be wrong to think the mystics borrow the language of love for it is theirs by right, though she didn’t call it the heavenly song of cock and cunt, perhaps that’s the inevitable conclusion of the sacred heart wounded into a womb, an arrow in the hand of an angel piercing such a depth in the body until it’s beyond what the body knows, delirious among the lilies or tasting the sweet meats of that table. Yet whoever the mystic woman is, she’s not ‘about’ sex; it’s not some sexual fantasy that she lies with in the dark mansion of God, sleeping every night in a different room, curling herself to the different shapes of emptiness. It’s not some narrative of first he this, then she that, that makes her tremble, being naked and open to nothing but that noche oscura, when with love inflamed, the saint runs out of the house into the hills, for she remains, asleep and dreaming, and in God’s innumerable rooms, innumerable forms and shapes of love, she lies down with them all in the depths of her body and blood, until every vision and icon shines with a glimpse of the forgotten and atavistic feminine body, pouring out of her as if out of the nipple of that blue stone embedded in the miraculous hand, as she herself becomes her own threshold; no faces remembered or imagined flicker across the hymen of her mind, for it’s not a penis, even God’s, that she imagines, but the form of herself, the knowing of the body of her own feeling, as in the Old Testament it was said that Jacob knew Rachel or Lot knew his own daughters, the knowing of the body allowed only to men; women, only the known or unknown, as she is known and un- known but as she knows herself as she knows the other that she is not: she enters herself, with fingers of melting wax, of cold cucumber, with a thumb of glow, with all the abandoned utensils of domestic life, with a stalk from the forsaken garden, and with the lost wing feather of the angel of death and with the voice of a baby’s cry nursing on the vestigial milk of the mother of mercy.

the white of your skin, for skin, except when truly albino, always has some other color sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf, a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting stream, a richness implied of its many layers, the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity that lies within and makes the skin shed, not like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid ease of being—one resting upon the other, the sliver of your shoulder against the black fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed (as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga whales came swimming toward me—how white they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent as white fire, gliding through the weight of water, and when they sang in that chamber as small as the chambers of the human heart, murky with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments of what they had consumed, I was almost in love with them; they seemed the lost children of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other of all the existences they had left behind, their fins like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling like canaries of the sea:there was no darkness in their bodies, like clouds drifting through unkempt skies, they illuminated the room). So I did not think of you so much as I felt you drifting through my being, in some gesture that held me poised like a hummingbird above the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you above the heart, and by above I mean there, not that geometric center, the breastbone that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake for the place where the heart lies, but the exact location, a little to the left, just on the crescent where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing, the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin and night that opens in imagination and in feeling upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where angels were once believed to dance, and all that nakedness without could not have been except for all that burning deep within

My damn cat brings me a dead songbird, wren or finch, I don’t know what it is— I mistook at first its folded grey for a strangely shaped piece of lint in the cubicle beneath my desk—nor which cat for I have two: Cricket with her dense body and stubby legs who jumps down from every shelf so reverberatingly, I call her the Black Bomb, or Ingrid, the quiet Russian Blue, whom I call Gritty because her coat is stealthy with dust. They’re always leaving me offerings—the mouse upon the threshold when I return from some trip, the redheaded grosbeak on the sill— but death is different in the front yard or even on the threshold, than Death on a particular morning, crawling into the house, carrying a warm form frozen in its warm mouth, tongue and tooth salivating a fluff of warble and whistle into a smoothly folded, iced, silenced thing, Death triumphant,affectionate! as if anyone would be happy feeding upon dead songs torn from the air.

“There is no muse of translation,” the translator reminds as he struggles with Pindar’s victory odes, and what he means is that the imagery is overwhelming: the hissing of snakes as Medusa’s sisters mourn her death, the baby Iamos “lying on a bed of yellow and purple violets,” Heracles with his baby hands strangling the two serpents sent “to devour him on the day of his birth” so every translator must beware of “rank transplantation.” Just imagine, if one were to translate the line as “Forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.” How ridiculous that admonition to a king. Better to transpose to the vague modern, though Pindar “perversely, from our point of view—often seems to relish... the concrete image,” and it’s just there that I think perhaps all being is translation; the child I was at the kitchen table, translating my mother into my father, my father into my mother; each one’s “inviolate honey” becoming the “blameless venom” of the other. So now I too prefer the naked tongue, even pained and writing, caught in hammer and tongs, flexed and torqued upon the anvil, until the metal turns mercurial, quick, spilling into and out of the shape of everything that is. For all day, while that pair of grey-eyed serpents feeds the abandoned child on honey, and the e-mail box fills with a multitude of voices debating the distinctions of the hoaxes of authorship—the pseudonym, the heteronym, all the masks we can put on—I have trembled because of my tongue. Because it insisted upon saying I love you. So it waits and waits for some word from you. It’s late in the afternoon when you finally reply and then to the quote I sent to a list. I read obliquely, wondering if I should hope because you say you’re thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnets (the beloved and the lover’s love) or if I’m lost to the shadows you’re going off to dispel with a cup of coffee, that “best” at the end of your letter, my allotment from now on. Is it too much love or too little that I have translated into being? Oh by now I’m mistyping forget your tongue upon the anvil that the tongue itself has made.

Oh, we fear our enemy’s mind, the shape in his thought that resembles the cripple in our own, for it’s not just his fear we fear, but his love and his paradise. We fear he will deprive us of our peace of mind, and, fearing this, are thus deprived, so we must go to war, to be free of this terror, this unremitting fear, that he might he might, he might. Oh it’s hard to say what he might do or feel or think. Except all that we cannot bear of feeling or thinking—so his might must be met with might of armor and of intent—informed by all the hunker down within the bunker of ourselves. How does he love? and eat? and drink? He must be all strategy or some sick lie. How can reason unlock such a door, for we bar it too with friends and lovers, in waking hours, on ordinary days? Finding the other so senseless and unknown, we go to war to feel free of the fear of our own minds, and so come to ruin in our hearts of ordinary days.

What did we suffer for? why did we flee our houses as if we had been hostages at our own tables? Even free, we were not free, we kept breaking down in thrift stores, our eyes tearing in bins of glasses taken from the faces of the dead; disoriented and dizzy as crows swarming the corpses of our own hearts, in the aisles of the department stores filled with the glitter of plenty, we kept spilling coffee on ourselves. Why are we forever afraid of bathtubs, of water hitting us in the face like the invisible stoning of an anonymous crowd, why does buying makeup make us feel guilty, why do we eat our food like thieves? Why do we sneak our friends in the back door and make our love climb up a tree? Why do our lies nest within one another like diminishing dolls? Why do we jump when the smallest child pushes open a door? Why are we afraid of the whistling of teapots? Who’s coming in to read over our shoulders our most secret thoughts, who’s clinging to our roofs like a demon? Why is his cheerfulness even more frightening than his anger? Why does my hope burn like the scar of a burn on my breast? Why are you an eye floating in a pool of dead water, blue; and unable to breathe? Why do we keep asking why? How do we know how to stop it if we don’t know why it began? How can we unravel so much violence followed by so much lie? How will we know when it’s ever over? or believe it will ever stop?