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Published in Women and Language (14:2) |
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Boy haphazardly leapt through walls. Position was what got him down. Always having to sink into this or that floorboard, clunking around on two feet. He remained transparent through the years (though he would refer to them as tears). Boy wanted to remain a question. He waited for someone else to mark him. Jenette came into his life with the sudden sensual power of plaster-dust. She was solid in his bedroom in a way he could never be, transcending his fears of form. The way she could reach him at night, touching his calculus, that part of him which topologized universe. For the first time, Boy thought seriously about birth. Something was happening to him, he was being strangled into presence. And even this was not enough, for Jenette wanted him to speak. She jumped onto his prone chest, grabbing either side of his head "You have to speak to me, you bastard, you have to speak!" Boy had never thought of himself as in retreat. But now he wished he were asteroidal, orbiting along some other, starry river. In the angry demand of Jenette's aqueous stare he felt his own cataclysm. Boy said "I don't know what to say," startled by a newfound feeling that words were weapons. Jenette had a plan for him, and that plan was talking. Worst of it was, Boy's habitual drifting into grains of wood, or atomic rain-seeding cloud vapor and the like was not enough for Jenette. She had marked him as a failure. The weight of her thighs upon him was an erotic vise, squeezing his breath out, squeezing him into her world. Her hands grabbing him, a concrete creation. These were the early days of fall, when bright yellow maple leaves slowly fell in the driveway. Boy thought, if only I were able to say "I am yellow like the fall," and be understood. Or, "yellow leaves, of these, that move, my brightness for you that meets, welcome, daylight, drum." In this way, the significance of Jenette's weight and the fall were not lost on Boy. It wasn´t the fear of Jenette that paralyzed him, but the way the way words demanded more words. Jenette found another lover more able to talk with her. During this hiatus Boy became confused about himself. The act of speaking became an act of contrition, a duty and a practice. Next time, he thought, he would be more ready. Stars expand, when novae, moving at the radial velocity of the wish of a heart. In the cavern of his demiurge, Boy continued to dream of universe and universes. It was a compulsion through which he attended to his own creation. Why, he wondered, were imaginings so distant from his body, and at the same time, so intimate? Was this an irremediable wound, an irremediable world? Or his way of speaking truthfully about matters of importance? He was never one to sit and play with puzzles, he often found ways to change their basic structure, their form. So he could not create a story, he could not well imagine a story working that involved continuous forms, being themselves, moving along through time. Though clothes hid nothing for him, nor skin, he could not speak to Jenette. He was unable to believe in her body. Stars compress matter, achieving great heat, activating light energy through fusion. Events continued to compress. "Jenette," he cried, long after she had left, "I am here, I am of this world." Richard Gilbert |