the body in four parts.

excerpted from Janet Kauffman's the body in four parts.

It is the dream of the body -- to know a place bodily and to say so. To take words into and out of itself. To have words assume bodily shape, salamander or milk, it doesn't matter. To inhabit a shore, a fabulous body of water, debris, insects drilled in the sand.

Where in the world can the body say, I am in my element?

The body strips to its flesh, and flame, and dives. When air gives out, and blues and greens simplify into dark, lips open the way lips open for kisses.

But the body, more fully desirous, recalcitrant in the extreme, says, even there, No, this is not the world I dreamed of. This is not the world.