Children, a musician once said, are born wordlessly imploring their mothers to sing to them. The human body is, at its core, an instrument of song. And so, of course, are celestial bodies, though we hear them only in our sleep.
Melting blue marbled earth breathing wordless music in vast throaty syllables of lung-tissue softness. (Somewhere east of Samoa, the heaving bosom of the ocean swims under her see-through negligee of clouds like the detachable blue lung in the transparent chest of the scale-model manikin you built as a child.) Touched by felt hammers of darkness, her velvety vocal cords are stretched to the circumference, parallel lines of force that begin from nowhere and intersect there, on infinite arcs, somewhere beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. Deerskin pelt: Arabia seen from space. Tawny suede. Softer than under a blouse, or a skirt, which she shimmies to her ankles with an electric rustle after unbuckling her Van Allen radiation belt. Wriggles out of her Doppler shift. Humid, dewy gem. Naked to the heavens, caressed by the hand of the void. Waiting for a solar wind to lick her moisture off. Poised to strike astronauts mad with her beauty, as they hover weightless, peeping like boys through a Pyrex porthole on the international space station. In sleep we wear the earth like earmuffs, tête à l’étau, as if she sang with her thighs. Leg-locked in the music of the infinite. (We all know the music women make when they’re pleased.)
The blouse of clouds that hide your beauty’s form
Obliterated by a summer storm
You stand nude to the horizon: this is what
Set all things stirring once in a boy’s gut.
We all have skin in this game. “Human” derives from “humus,” earth. Our nostrils are never totally disencumbered from the soil of our birth. We imbibe her essence, the mother’s essence, through our nostrils every time we breathe, like craft cocktails. Sex On the Beach. The Slippery Nipple. Eye of the Komodo. (Jörmungandr, the old Norse World Serpent. Our olfactory bulbs are close to our reptilian centers, two regions connected like the East Side and Williamsburg by the Canarsie tube of the mind.) La Puesta Del Sol, vermouth and red grapefruit juice. Her drowsy fumes make the sun sleepy. To breathe mortal air is to be always more or less tipsy on her sunset perfume. We would constantly lose our heads if it weren’t for the stars to guide us. The stars are our principles, our conscience, our mathematics and our Last Judgement. Constellations are our tea leaves, parliamentary rules of order and city council by-laws. The sober man wakes before Phosphorus, to feel his flesh shrink and skin harden and sting under a cold shower of stars. But with her arts of seduction the earth eventually invites every man under her warm, mouldering blanket of human compost, giardino delle delizie terrene, which at this very moment sticks to the soles our shoes.
Rocks tower in the distance, seem to float in the blazing blue sea like volcanic dumplings. Black Sea. Black dumplings. Sweet as honey, a child kneels on a pine bench, hair in a pirate’s kerchief, elbows propped in front of her on a mahogany yacht railing, her little bikini-diapered derrière protruding backward like a sticky bun wrapped in pastry parchment. Russian plutocrat’s daughter. Made his money from God knows what environmental obscenity. Vast salt basin where the Aral Sea once stood. But his daughter is sweet, with her sunburned nose. She is the earth. Every outrage to the virginity of the sea, the forest and the mountains seems to render her more intact. “I will bury you,” she seems to say to her industrialist father as she smiles, like Khrushchev, with apple-cheeked serenity at peaks in the distant Caucasus, whose snows streak the air like clouds.
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