Body and Soul Talk

I’m coughing like a howler monkey and snorting like a pig. My teeth are turning a funny yellow-brown, and my skin is peeling down. You might think I’m just a cup of tepid tea, but there’s this inner me screaming to get out. The girl who sits straddle-legged on the wooden floor playing jacks—ones, twos, threes, all the way to tens, in one fell swoop. But here I am, woman beyond girl, hag beyond woman, and all the parts of me want to tell you how they feel about this woman they belong to, even though she’s the smallest dot, the tiniest prop any god could make.

So, I ask my body how it feels about the trip. I line the parts up against the wall, execution style. I say, “So tell me about your life,” and I wait for their answer. I wait while the sky turns from bright to gray. I wait while the wind blows leaves across my garden. I wait while the bamboo rustles against the fence, and I think about all the ways my body has served me, and I’m pissed that it’s getting old and creaky, and I want to retrieve the pieces, like maybe all I need is a couple of tiny new screws or a can of oil like the Tin Man. Maybe a new wardrobe of fresh pink skin and a couple of hats to ward off bats and cats and white moths that fly in your face. But all my body wants is a bathrobe and slippers or slip on shoes. I’m ready to shoot, but I don’t have a gun.

My feet start to talk. We walked through rain puddles in red rubber boots half a century ago. We walked in streams, along the ocean’s edge and on streets in Europe and LA. We trekked up and down Sierra trails and along the Owens River’s banks. We remember how we forgot to hurt when we danced in stiletto pumps. What we wish for now is another walk through Paris, another climb up the steep hills of Montmartre. We want to repeat the way our toes curled and uncurled in the flight of orgasm. We don’t really care much about painted toenails, but the woman who owns us does, so we go along for the ride to the edge of pedicures. We would like to be born again without the gouty ankles and bony arches.

My vagina wants to be a Judy Chicago plate or a Double Delight rose, pink and creamy, innocent and worldly, young and old, beautiful and mysterious, as mythic as a Peruvian goddess, as principled as a defense lawyer on the take, with Sophia Loren lips and limbs as sweet as
twisted honeysuckle waiting to be milked.

My soul, that place between brain and heart, between heart and gut, between gut and vagina, that elusive field, untouchable by mind. I ask if it exists, and it says, “Maybe so, just to please god.” No, my soul’s not a place, but a space, an open field that wants to run all the way to the sky. My soul wants to swim in more oceans and eat more warm blackberries straight from the vine. My soul thinks she knew something of love. My soul believes I tried to love my mother and almost got there, like almost getting to Mecca. My soul wants to believe I knew how to love my sons when I saved their tiny white baby shoes in a box until they molded in the garage. It’s a precarious journey to love, always the fear of snakes on the path or a precipice that leaves you hanging.

I want those days back when my feet and my vagina and my soul thought they were invincible. The time when they sang in harmony, the days when they could dance and run or make love from night until dawn. I don’t want to cross over. I don’t want to become a box of ashes in a crypt or a mass of rotting flesh in the ground. I don’t want to give up this world and I won’t stop singing the blues.