In the Woods of Your Words
Seduced by your wild mythology — a prose-poem
In your deep-wooded words, love, is there a distinction between finding and losing my way?
The thickening dusk of our desire — wrapping itself around my body, redolent with scents of rearing pine-trees, moistened grass and seed-dreaming loam — I’m running barefoot. Caught in the surreal, between hemispherically opposed and orbiting bodies and an eternally-elongated night, my pale gown of sleep blooms bell-like, like an indolent trumpet flower weighted downwards with heady scent; my thighs yearning out of its flounce of petals like pollen-drunk stamens, stretching for you in the dark.
Straining to catch the breath flying out of my mouth, always just a fleeting step ahead of me; breaths taut with outstretched exhalings of fingers eerie, frantic to find you… reading the fecundity of fermented air for traces of your passing.
In this liminality of tree-hushed terrain, sprung up by the force of longing between our wandering figures, I’m scent-haunted, nipping at the enigma of your shadow. Your power grows by moonlight, chiaroscuro flickers revealing your fey nature — bare-chested, cloven-footed — I’m seduced by your wild mythology. Follow the deep flute of your laughter only to find you’re —
Here and not-here. In the ardour of my searching, I levitate from my body via streams of sound-currents, swift as an east wind, ethereal as firefly phosphorescence to your woods, your neck. Climb the trunk of you. Feel me trace the path of your jugular as I curl into the cockleshell of your ear, a tiny Thumbelina.
Take me on your midnight quests, love — a series of hero’s journeys — secret eavesdropper of your forested adventures, part-narrator of your night-wrapped tales — invisible catalyst to the surprise of your sighs, catching us both unawares, darting out like startled deer across your night-watch, across the threshold of my wonder at —
You — toss words for me, like luminous breadcrumbs under the flooding moon of your mind. I cannot but follow — and I’m running again to scoop them up, to catch not just my breath, but grasp the evidence of your presence between the trees of the image-repertoire. But the crumbs are seeping down into soil, fast-turning compostings, sprouting roots grown instantly into entanglements underfoot — it’s an enchanted forest after all, love.
A cloud passing over the moon, momentary dark emerging into light is all the time needed for a century of growth. So your words lie in wait to ensnare me, trip me up, tumble me over — it’s no casual encounter. Rooted in arcane archetypes of your soul, they pull me down to your subterranean chambers, where the Pan of you reigns in carnal chaos. You invite me to feast at your table — stain me with wildberries, crack nuts with your teeth to tempt my mouth.
The metaphors twist and turn like roots, changing again as another cloud passes over the mercurial moon and —
I’m a blind woman in the thick of you, feeling my way through your words, like secret marks in bark on tree-trunks. Woody uprisings scratch and kiss the whorls of my fingertips, slide into intricacies of arcs and swirls of skin like miniature labyrinths. Your words are sliding secret subtexts under the delicacy of epidermis, seeping into my bloodstream.
Your words prick my fingers like the soporific spindle of a Sleeping Beauty spell — silencing me with their needled quickenings. Pulling me under you, under your hushing minked blanket of whispered intimations. Rendering me senseless.
Your words pierce the undersides of my soles like unfamiliar solid ground to the aquatic phantom-tail of a mermaid who only wanted to be human enough for her prince.
Your words permeate my being, awakening me like a charmed kiss from a numbed life-dream, an insidious inverse slumber, where desire turned its face from me and would not speak my name.
Your words penetrate me like the bite of canines and incisors in the musky embrace of the wolf. Lying down in the wood-dark night of a feminist fairytale where the wolf is re-imagined — as midnight ravishings undressed and bared — as danger sought and desire satiated — as anything this reclaimed heroine wants him to be.
Where the wolf is you, love. Where I want the fierce ecstasy of your words to tear me — lovingly — apart. A desecration of husked habits of the half-asleep, that I may re-member myself, and the veracity of marrow-deep forest instincts.
© Melissa Coffey August 2021 (For the ineffable J.D. Harms)
Melissa Coffey is a Melbourne-based writer, editor, poet & performer. She is fascinated with the place where words emerge from our most visceral of experiences. Her short stories, creative essays and poetry are published in numerous international and Australian anthologies (sometimes incognito).
In response to yet another alchemizing prompt from the delectable mind of J.D. Harms — the “power of an opening question”. And I cannot deny the influence of Angela Carter’s subversive, sometimes feminist and darkly erotic collection of re-imagined fairytales The Bloody Chamber.
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