A plaintive call begins in dreaming, siphons me from sleep. I can feel her already licking me under the covers. Rousing. Rising, still wet with the earrings and scarves of a nebulous dreaming hung about me in limpid pools. Beginning, barefoot. Naked as possible. Nothing but a loose red linen dress flapping like a flag, signalling for the wind to take me. Over lilac fields of sea lavender. Over her thickly curled cracked skin, parched, to where she softens and opens as the dark earth, accepting my worshipful foot. Pressing inwards, pulling tears in chandelier strings from my belly. Sweet blessed relief. Breath comes. Words. I tell her of my longing in a dance that is mutually evolving with the digital techno loop of swallow bleep. Feeling into her voluminous form. Flowing out from between my thighs. Marsh becoming mud becoming vivid green velvet sea moss becoming sea snail encrusted stones becoming sand applauding with tiny exploding holes and increasing slithering piles of worm casts becoming everlasting rippling emptiness that draws out a cruel and violent wailing from my bones. Manifesting as seals, collectively calling blood from flesh. Rubbery rocks shuffling sideways. A hundred Buddhas on the far sands, observing. Come to my river. I am waist deep in the channel, tide imploring: ‘go deeper’, dancing to the mourning howl of lovesick dogs. My dress has gone. Everything has gone. Only yesterday I was huddled in a hot cave with eleven naked women, speaking soul spells, spitting sweat into flames. What is left of us after these prayers? Pliny spoke of luminescence in the mouths of people who ate Pholas, the rock-boring shellfish. In this tiny wild and beautiful insane life, what breaks your heart the most? Devote your whole being to that.
