Within your curve
May 28, 2021
I
The world is shining out of you. You glow. Speaking about music, light spills from your eyes and lips and tumbles over onto me. I bask in the warmth of your words. Your enthusiasm is intoxicating. You’re riffing on jazz. Describing the song Blue Monk you say “It’s a negative picture image of the jazz standard…Full of offbeat and harmonic dissonance. It’s a blues format. With notes that ought not to work”. The composer, Thelonius, was a Monk who dedicated his life to music, not prayer.
My quiet contemplation is of you.
II
I love to look at you in the shifting light of dawn. I wake first, eyes opening to the negative of the day. You’re slowly exposed, as the curtain calls the daylight hours to your face. You, on your back, hair a golden mess, small, soft sounds of sleep slipping out. This time with you is mine alone. Encased within these secret minutes, wanting to catch the seconds, and cradle them in an outstretched palm that touches your awakening face.
III
I’m lying with you on a rise of earth by the ocean in New Plymouth. Crescendos of waves swirl about our heads, their sound carried on a wild wind. A cigarette to share. Red embered, fingers of unfurled wind steal its heat, scattering the ash like fireflies. Hanging above us, hunched, a bent flower without petals, is an orange Len Lye sculpture. Red eye blinking like Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Your hands cup gently around my ears. It’s to remove the high frequencies you say. White noise transforms to pink.
IV
My first instance of witnessing I fall for you even more. Goosebumps ignite along your arm as you describe a long tracking shot from the film Arrival. You offer out your limb, hairs upright like grass that grows on sand dunes, catching the shifting sands. It won’t be the last time your reverence for film becomes embossed upon your body. I wish to shrink myself miniature and lay down between these minute mountains, if only a minute. Inside a landscape that holds your joy I feel myself falling again and again and again into you.
V
On a balcony watching pigeons fly in formation, you’re next to me but I’m soaring along with them. Birds flocking forever steal my gaze. A murmuration is great clouds of starlings painting patterns in the air, like fast moving smoke signals. A synchronised caress upon the sky. Like static with the white removed. A galaxy inverted, swelling and contracting in time. Each starling follows others, joined to their neighbour. As I am joined to you. A murmur, a whisper, a breath between us.
VI
Have I ever laughed this much before? Chuckling, giggling, cackling, shrieking, ROFLing. Great explosions of laughter that carry us skyward on thermal updrafts. A whirling vortex that bubbles from belly to breast to burst. Out. Volcanic eruptions sending forth laughter flows. They’re forming new terrain. A foundation for the future.
VII
We’re talking clouds. You want to make a cloud algorithm. Cloud worlds. Cloud words. Cumulus, altocumulus, cirrocumulus, cumulonimbus, cirrus, cirrostratus, altostratus, nimbostratus, stratocumulus, stratus. I feel their shape rolling about in my mouth like Tangy Fruits. Tasty verbal morsels. Cirrrr-ussss. I stretch it thin, edges pulled to whisps. Cu-mu-lo-nim-bus, fills the entirety of my mouth with its popcorn edges. Nimbo-stratus. Feels agile on the tongue. These words are fun to say.
And contained within all of them is us.
VIII
If I were to describe your shape, would it be how your body feels beneath early morning fingers. Trailing a path familiar along the contours of your mole map, slipping
between cracks formed by sleepy limbs.
Your shape has no edges. Its radius twice what it should be. Not half,
but wholly encompassing. I curl up in your curve. Like a back-to-front bracket, wanting
to know how it feels to be contained within the shape of another.
