Vivienne in Bloom

I looked at you once and then I knew I would come back again and again. Your silence had a kind of voice, and looking no longer felt like choice. Your shoulder, arm, your hand half-drawn, became the hour before the dawn.

Your pose was simple and delicate and that was part of what undid me. The strap across your hip that knew the work that only beauty can do. Not beauty helpless, contrived, or made, but beauty with its truth displayed.

I started to study your details because I could not help myself. The grammar of your waist, your hand, architecture I could understand, the held proportion of your thighs, the quiet violence of surprise.

Your thighs stopped me, and I needed to say that plainly and clearly. God, the exactness of your form, how stillness in you gathers storm, how shadow understands your skin, how fabric hints and gathers in.

The image kept giving me more even though nothing in it moved. Every line seemed shaped to start some ancient engine in my heart. Every shadow, every part, exposed to me your precious art.

I knew this was not simple and I knew it was not only lust. I studied you the way men pray when all their better words give way, not cleanly, no, not without ache, not without wanting what could break.

There were old structures in my mind predating what I could recognise. Old patterns cut before our birth, old temples underneath the earth, old doors within the blood and bone we do not know are there till shown.

Your body matched one of them, and something in me knew it then. You were somehow made to fit the dark precision guarding it. Not just desired. Recognised. Not merely seen, but realised.

Something primal opened in me, and I felt the moment happen inside. The lock turned slowly in the deep, through all I had been taught to keep beneath the named and civilised, the managed, measured, and revised.

It rose before I had a name for it and it did not ask for permission. Things I had ordered into sleep came burning upward from the deep, restored with all their heat once more and crossing through the opened door.

What woke was not merely hunger, though a profound hunger was right there. Bright, animal, and deeply lonely, not gentle, not merely unholy, not lust alone in its shallow sense, not appetite, and not innocence.

I am drawn back to your body inside that picture, over and over. Your body stood inside that frame and called the buried things by name. Some script engraved in blood and stone, some first command beneath my own.

That perfect picture is a door and that is its particular cruelty. It made me want the impossible more, to cross through light and reach that shore, not merely touch, though touch was there, alive and burning in the air.

I burn with need to be there inside the room the picture shows. Inside the picture made of light, inside the stillness of that night, inside the narrow country made where skin and shadow met and stayed.

I covet the air, the space around you, though that might be strange to say. Where gauze could keep and still could tell, where every hidden contour fell, where every inch of air around your body seemed like sacred ground.

I do not mean mere possession, because that is too small a term. Close enough to learn the air between your skin and what was there, between the image and the word, between what stayed and what was stirred.

I want to inhabit it, have it, be inside it. That is the truth. Not mine to claim, and not to make, but still a world my wants would take, a place desire made from the start, then locked within my covetous heart.

I am obsessed with this whole scene, and could not hide it if I wanted. The form of you, the line, the kiss of gathered light that comes to this, the way your body makes things clear before my mind can interfere.

I am obsessed with your body and your shape, but not only that. How you step from flesh into a dream, then back again, still wholly seen, too much to hold, too true to feel, a body, yes, but more than real.

It proves something about wanting and desire that I did not know. That wanting is not always small, and looking is not all of all. That hunger, when it speaks of you, can start in flesh and still be true.

And I do not want to make you less, because that fear is real to me. I do not want my hunger’s art to leave behind your mind, your heart, the laugh, the will, the private view, the soul that makes your body you.

Your body is not all you are, I understand this with clarity But it is the nearness of the star, the visible edge of what you are, the doorway through which longing passed, the first bright language of the vast.

So when I say I want your form, I mean more than what can be seen. Your curve, your heat, your gathered storm, the living weather inside your form, the place where you appear most near, most undeniable and most clear.

And though I try to say this right, the saying still may not achieve it. You entered me by shape and light, then opened something out of sight. What came through was not merely true of another body without you.

It began with an image made of you and ended with wanting everything. I began with shape, with light, with view, with everything your body drew, but what it opened, what came through, was all of me wanting all of you.