notes from the understory
(layer 20, direction one)
All of it begins. I’m soaked to the skin by a sudden downpour. My gray silk
blouse won’t come free from the skin of my chest, my arms. I abandon the
meanings of silk and skin to a moth-wing thinness, fluttering skyward.
Sun returns to warm the blue question of what sky might become, which
remains answerless as it fills with what seem to be clouds, but they’re only potential.
All of it begins. I ask if there are still sleeves wetly affixed to what I thought
were my arms? Will I act within only one meaning of “arms”?
Judith Butler offers me Merleau-Ponty’s reply—the meaning of flesh is
texture, which returns to, and conforms to, itself.
It begins. I wear flesh wet. I
