MICHAEL BRODSKY
223
alien element. And I did not want to deceive her, I wanted her to know
she would soon be flooded, no crevice un irrigated, so that she would
not reproach me later, as my mother did when I wet the bed. Yes, that
was it, a dizzying sensation, as incontinence. I told myself the sentence,
I'm going to come, made no difference one way or the other.
It
was
futile to decompose it, or rather the frame of mind that engendered it.
But then I subtracted it from its moment and felt wildly desolate
without it. So I knew it was there for a reason.
In
some way, it showed
her I was in control, to the very last. My spurt was intentional. I was
not giving way, as I moaned I only seemed to decompose, all fat gone
sour.
Maybe when she said, as my arm advanced toward her middle, like
the dove
to
the olive branch, You are curious about my thigh, she
meant, Don 't touch me. I swam anew in a sea of prohibitions, real or
imagined. The old muck coated my shoals. But I could not relinquish'
my curiosity, I had
to
go on. I looked at her naked body and supplied
myself with targets. But it was all pretense. There was no casual
staking out of claims. I could not stake out targets the wayan astron–
omer stakes out constellations.
If
I decided on her navel , my forefinger
never landed there. Always a little to the left or right.
It
would have
been too painful to coincide with myself, to limit myself to the
realization of my aims.
It
was like fitting perfectly the coffin assigned
you. My gesture had a trajectory. Who knew where my forefinger
would be at the end of the trajectory. Whenever a part of her body
overwhelmed me, unmanned me, breast, a thigh , a warm covert, then I
instantly decided it was my target. As if I wanted to traverse the infinite
distance between me and it. I confused its control over me with my
control over it. But for the duration of a gesture I was calmed, I was the
gesture. When a gesture expired I expired. She assumed I had a plan,
some inner blueprint. But I was through with coordinate system. I was
wide open
to
stimuli, vulnerable, unprotected. So that when I said this
cunt ass cleft I was not so much pointing as announcing my homecom–
ing. I did not so much stake out a claim as succumb to a claim on me.
In
short, I did not point so much as let her, or rather the parts of her
tha t enticed, overwhelm, bring me full circle. She pointed through me.
Ours was a composite body. And that composite body had no parts. At
least, for the duration of an emotion, a gesture, that body had no parts.
II was the gesture, it was the emotion. I did not annex her body, I was
fused with it. Every point of that body on which a gesture came to rest
was a point only later, in retrospect. The point was the end of a
trajectory. There was an eruption and it had to play itself out, the
