Wild Tongue

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.