...and I realize when I touch your wings and they don't disappear that I must be dreaming.
The feathers are borrowed from autumn's palette: gold, bronze, ivory. My fingertips brush as gently as I can when you are trembling like this beneath my touch. I know very well that divine messengers are not the stereotype found in cathedral paintings and man's scripture. Rarely do you want me gentle, my muse, my inspiration, my angel.
I turn my wrist, slide the pads of my fingers over the variegated tips of you. Silken strands, stiff with desire, fan against my skin; sensation begins there, where our bodies meet, and travels through nerves and blood and bone to pool in my palms like hot stones. I find I cannot breathe. When I manage a gasp, the air drawn between my parted lips, that floods over my tongue, is the scent of you, richer than any holy wine, complex like autumn itself, your theme, your element, your midnight gaze that speaks volumes in the silence.
I reach down and take your hand. Hold it up, palm to palm against my own. We are so different. We are so the same. I bow my head, turn your hand to my cheek. Turn my head to kiss the lines of your fingers and thumb. I cannot stop myself. My tongue passes, soft, light, the barest taste of you stolen in this moment, our moment.
And I receive my communion.
Divine inspiration...
Emotions. Chicks love to talk about them. Guys love to roll their eyes and claim they don't have them. Words like “deconstruction” and “processing” leave the domain of engineers and ballet dance their way across a much more touchy-feely stage. You may love them, dread them, wallow in them, rejoice with them, but no matter our attitude (or Attitude) we all live with them – ours and others. To me, emotions are the double fudge icing on the creamy but vanilla cupcake.
...and there is moonlight. Pale like the word “cool” and glancing over everything including your bare skin which is cream and roses and imperfect and so I know you are real and not mythology. My eyes drink. My hands sing. My heart pounds so loud in my ears I cannot hear the prayer that tumbles from my lips as I sink to my knees before you, tears streaming down my cheeks...
If I stand in the snow at the top of a long mountain trail, I will feel cold. If I open my arms and turn my face upwards beneath the hot summer sun, I will feel the warmth burn welcome across me. If I take speed, wrap her around me as I wrap myself around my bike, and blaze trails like so many pioneers before me, I will feel the wind, the bite, the slice of molecules and distance; I will feel free.
Ah, but that last is not a physical sensation. That last is emotion. Physical sensation is mundane, hard-wired into our genome. Not boring, not unwelcome, certainly not to be ignored but most often expected. The body is made to feel (touch and be touched) but also to *feel.* I have experienced physical sensation that was transcendent, literally lifting my sense of self out of my body only to linger in that space just beyond it... but I have felt this divinity more often in response to that mysterious other location, my own State of Emotion.
...there is the feeling of your hips in my hands. There is the feeling of my cheek against your thigh. There is the perfection in the knowledge that since the beginning of poets and writers there have been lover muses. The Greeks and Romans did not corner the market, nor close the market, on other-worldly creatures guiding prose, guiding soldiers, guiding light in an otherwise darkened and darkening world. Stars spin overhead, twilight sky like its own cosmos, and I cease to know where you begin and I end. I ended the moment we became this touch...
This is how we hear our Christ. My friend asks me often, “How do I hear Him?” Then she teases, “I don't hear Him as clearly as you do. You have a direct line or something.” She makes me smile. Makes me laugh. But I don't have a direct line; not unless we all do. I am no special anything; I just have a secret.
Christ is not a physical sensation any more than making love is purely a physical sensation, and there is more a connection between Christ and love making than any of man's denominations want us to recognize. Christ, like the best lover, makes His appeals to our emotional state. He writes His messages on our emotional slate. He is that first time we look across the room at the person we will love forever and something... wonderment, discovery... blooms in our chests, spills down our limbs. Emotion becomes physical, tangible, real. Christ walks with us, talks to us, becomes physical, tangible, real.
...and I am holding you. The wind is strong and cold but neither of us feel it. Your wings enfold me, protect me. The clouds roll in low with menace in the night. They open suddenly, violently. Rainfall. Rainstorm. You whisper words into my hair and the rain becomes warm, baptism, rebirth in your arms.
The dawn is coming. I know you will leave. You have given me your gift and I accepted on my knees. Offerings have been exchanged. Inspiration sweet on my lips. But I cannot let go. I whisper, “Stay.”
You look at me. Your eyes are ten thousand colors of autumn and sea and sky and heaven. You tilt your head to one side. You say without speaking, “No one has ever asked me to stay.”
I look at you openly. I hand you my everything. I bare my heart. “Than let me be the first.”
And the emotion between us is real, is physical, is Christ.
EJ
