Post by goldenmyst on Jun 7, 2018 9:59:15 GMT -6
A Lonesome Planet Breathes: Congolese Quest 2
My earthbound body finds me before a green zebra fruit fresh from Eden’s garden and tended by an African Eve whose bare hands and body dig into the organic soil. She fills her hours getting kissed by the heavenly gold of sun sent sin.
Her plot of dirt is tucked away in a patch of herbage sown. Bees do the pollen polka for the earth to be with watermelon. Her sweet little grunts tell me that planting is erotic for her.
The three of us join in a circle to settle into the unbroken chain. I grasp his calloused hand with her soft palm enveloped in my sensual clasp.
Insects hum hypnotically. We dance to Afro-pop which plays on a boom box. Their laughter warms my heart. The woman speaks like birdsong. My guide says, “She wants you to marry her.”
I envision my African songbird and me as lovers in a past life. I can visualize us in a circle of yurts of yak herders on the vast steppe of Asia; or among the Peruvian Indian’s tents scattered in a lush green valley in the snow-capped Andes; or when we were Aborigines dancing around a fire in the cool outback night.
With the first blush of dawn, she leads me and my feet sink into the wet mud making love to the earth. My toes are sunk into the luscious soil. My senses awaken into radiant awareness. I can hear the hiss of a crocodile even with the whoop of a rumpus of baboons.
She rocks her ghost baby of the future in her arms. She holds her bundle of tomorrow’s joy to her breasts. But am I ready to be a father?
An oval pool reflects the emerald trees. Her canary song speech awakens a choir of forest birds. Her eyes glitter with golden tears of joy.
I squeeze her bird-delicate shoulders. Her eyes close into mystic rosebuds. Her body quivers, under my touch, like a wild doe in the presence of humans. I grab a chunk of wet red clay and fingerpaint her two hillocks with fiery suns radiating from the nexuses of her sensate swells.
Her reverential hands gather the cool essence in her supple palms. She anoints my sacred stones in holy water. The wet kiss of her touch upon my bare skin leaves fingerprints deep within. She bathes my loins until they rejoice in the ageless morning of a natal world born of mystery.
The magic hour of nightfall approaches. The dying embers of swollen sun twinkle like stars adrift in time in her eyes. She pulls me by the hand with the urgency of the moon tugging on the sea. The ivy-covered forest floor resounds with crickets chirping, frogs croaking, and a bird singing. Fireflies blink on and off like stars in the Galactic night. They splash light upon the green leaves of the trees and ivy. I fill my lungs with cool dusk air redolent with the smells of dirt, grass, and flowers. Their glowing tails show us the trail to a house, decaying in the forest solitude.
We open the door to a future I never considered. Our phosphorescent friends shed light on the dust motes which are suspended in a silent dance. The walls are varnished in sepia moon paint. The full moon casts its spell, putting us in the mood for love.
Wrinkled boots hang pendulously from rusty nails. A salt caked jar sparkles like a pauper’s chandelier. The dresser has sinuous cracks like tree limbs branching into arabesque swirls. The mattress molders in the dusky quiet. Shards of glass are scattered like diamonds in a corner shrouded in soft darkness.
The little-winged lanterns shine on a spider that weaves its translucent web with its strands gathered in a cathedral of death. The spider’s church shimmers in heavenly perfection. Its crystal lattice glows with holy fire. The predator of time stalks my lonely hours. Life found purchase here once. It might be found again with caring and hard selfless work. I hear laughter from the tree swing.
She looks misty-eyed. Orange patterns dance through the window panes. The trees outside appear blurred in a reddened light paint. Shadows crawl across the floor in patterns of coal like dark clouds. The shadowy trees, seen through the windows, are like ancient Titans who haunt my world with preternatural beauty. She welcomes me to the bed. Moonlight slants across the room and silhouettes the trees that sway in a restless forest wind waltz.
Her touch is the rich earth which nourishes my roots. Her body is the open flower craving my pollen. She opens each petal of my heart with gentle persistence and lays bare my center. She gently cradles my most secret self-holding the vulnerable egg of my deepest feelings. She tenderly strokes my center. The lilt of her song falls like gentle rain upon my sensate being. Each note is full of the sweet nectar of her ardor as I sow seeds of love in the garden of her soul.
Our floating flashbulb friends illuminate us imprinting my retinas. Our tail haloed friends blink merrily to the tune of her deep throated warble to let me see the passion play of her face as though she were a soul rising in ecstasy from purgatory into heaven.
After moonset, the light from stars which gave up the ghost eons ago haunts the ghostly hours before dawn.
My jungle chanteuse sings with feathery notes which rise into the treetops. Ferns shadow her curves in our rainforest haven where she forms vowels and consonants strung together into words with the song of a parrot but no mere echo. My feral woman builds her vocabulary like a mason who lays bricks for our house of love. “I love you” are her first words but Parrotese is her native tongue. Her thrush song is a flute-like ee-oh-lay, a carol of love for when she is feeling romantic. My favorite of her tunes is that of the African Golden Oriole which is a beautiful fluting fee-ooo fee-ooo and is more beautiful to me than the blown bamboo melodies which haunted me in my youth. Her tonalities include whistling when happy like a canary glad to be uncaged and free. When she is in a mellow mood she harmonizes with the wood warbler’s ‘pew-pew’.
My wife points to a tortoise sunning on a pile of dirt. She says, “Yeet yeet wurtle!” Then she makes a pillow with her hands and lays her head on it. She says, “weam” her word for “dream.” She creates a baby doll out of clay and holds it to her breast and belly. She tells me what the turtle told her while asleep about the tadpole that rests in her pool. I rub her belly to feel the tiny heartbeat but it is too soon. So she reaches out to caress my silky head with her fingertips.
My book reading tells me that our child grows legs where once was a tail, sprouts fingers and toes, where once there were webbed hands and feet, and transitions from frog-like gills to a simian physique.
She sings in a rainbow of notes which hover in the morning mist. The chirrup of her parakeet song turns into a louder, insistent tweweet and suddenly I understand. Our baby is about to be born.
I look at her smile and see the shimmer of sunshine on the water in the river. She is woman, with skin the color of the richest earth, sparkling brown eyes, and a sensuously curved body, naked as at birth. I turn around and reach out to touch the soft skin of my woman’s cheeks. She strokes my hips and sides. She embraces me and gently caresses the soft skin of my back and buttocks. Her chirps tell me that we are bird people, brothers, and sisters of the animals, plants, and rocks.
Suddenly her eyes turn into white marbles. Her stomach ripples with each of her wails. She gives birth to a beautiful androgynous boy. After a month of Sundays, I pick him up.
Misty rain glows with yellow streams of sunlight and soaks us in the earth’s translucent blood. I feel strange currents flow through my arteries. The forest breathes like a lover sleeping. Sadness creeps like ivy through the garden of my heart. Memories of our African Eden twine in knots of goodbye. A hand squeeze from her banishes my sorrow.
Our son is secure in the papoose I made for him out of bed sheets from the abandoned house where he was conceived. I gently part the matted curls from her forehead. A smile twinkles like starlight across her face with a rainbow reflected in her eyes.
We mist into showers of sunlight on our walk upriver and out of the forest into a new world pregnant with possibilities. From across the field, I smell smoke and hear people chanting. Insects hum hypnotically.
The Elder sings stories into life. Olduvai Gorge was the great birth canal of humankind. His prophecy is that one day the buried bones will be plowed under by suburban sprawl. Hamburgers will be served over Lucy’s plot. Shoppers will gather over ancient watering holes to sip gourmet coffee. People are ape creatures with oversized brains who gnaw the meat off bones with their greedy appetite. We are newfangled monkeys who utter strange hoots while scratching our groins in privacy like timid wallflowers. Our worrying about body hair is nonsensical. We cover ourselves in cotton, ashamed of nudity, instead of letting it all hang out like sane people. Commuters crawl across the land, stretched out like ants in metal bugs, honking like madmen in a lunatic asylum.
Our three day bus trip to Nairobi takes us across Tanzania into the Serengeti grasslands. The hours pass as I watch people in the fields carry bundles of wheat on their shoulders. I watch the brown skinned women carry their babies into thatched roof homes, to eat, sleep, and dream. As the day passes into dusk and I watch the dying red embers of the sun.
At the Kenyan border the customs man boards our bus to look at our papers but our attire is the focus of his attention. “You two look good in those potato sacks” the grinning man said.
“Burlap is the new silk where we come from” I say with a smile.
Lying in my bed back at our new home with the baby on my chest I think of the long years of toil ahead. I look at this miracle, the child who has fallen asleep in my arms. I gaze at him with the eyes of a father.
My earthbound body finds me before a green zebra fruit fresh from Eden’s garden and tended by an African Eve whose bare hands and body dig into the organic soil. She fills her hours getting kissed by the heavenly gold of sun sent sin.
Her plot of dirt is tucked away in a patch of herbage sown. Bees do the pollen polka for the earth to be with watermelon. Her sweet little grunts tell me that planting is erotic for her.
The three of us join in a circle to settle into the unbroken chain. I grasp his calloused hand with her soft palm enveloped in my sensual clasp.
Insects hum hypnotically. We dance to Afro-pop which plays on a boom box. Their laughter warms my heart. The woman speaks like birdsong. My guide says, “She wants you to marry her.”
I envision my African songbird and me as lovers in a past life. I can visualize us in a circle of yurts of yak herders on the vast steppe of Asia; or among the Peruvian Indian’s tents scattered in a lush green valley in the snow-capped Andes; or when we were Aborigines dancing around a fire in the cool outback night.
With the first blush of dawn, she leads me and my feet sink into the wet mud making love to the earth. My toes are sunk into the luscious soil. My senses awaken into radiant awareness. I can hear the hiss of a crocodile even with the whoop of a rumpus of baboons.
She rocks her ghost baby of the future in her arms. She holds her bundle of tomorrow’s joy to her breasts. But am I ready to be a father?
An oval pool reflects the emerald trees. Her canary song speech awakens a choir of forest birds. Her eyes glitter with golden tears of joy.
I squeeze her bird-delicate shoulders. Her eyes close into mystic rosebuds. Her body quivers, under my touch, like a wild doe in the presence of humans. I grab a chunk of wet red clay and fingerpaint her two hillocks with fiery suns radiating from the nexuses of her sensate swells.
Her reverential hands gather the cool essence in her supple palms. She anoints my sacred stones in holy water. The wet kiss of her touch upon my bare skin leaves fingerprints deep within. She bathes my loins until they rejoice in the ageless morning of a natal world born of mystery.
The magic hour of nightfall approaches. The dying embers of swollen sun twinkle like stars adrift in time in her eyes. She pulls me by the hand with the urgency of the moon tugging on the sea. The ivy-covered forest floor resounds with crickets chirping, frogs croaking, and a bird singing. Fireflies blink on and off like stars in the Galactic night. They splash light upon the green leaves of the trees and ivy. I fill my lungs with cool dusk air redolent with the smells of dirt, grass, and flowers. Their glowing tails show us the trail to a house, decaying in the forest solitude.
We open the door to a future I never considered. Our phosphorescent friends shed light on the dust motes which are suspended in a silent dance. The walls are varnished in sepia moon paint. The full moon casts its spell, putting us in the mood for love.
Wrinkled boots hang pendulously from rusty nails. A salt caked jar sparkles like a pauper’s chandelier. The dresser has sinuous cracks like tree limbs branching into arabesque swirls. The mattress molders in the dusky quiet. Shards of glass are scattered like diamonds in a corner shrouded in soft darkness.
The little-winged lanterns shine on a spider that weaves its translucent web with its strands gathered in a cathedral of death. The spider’s church shimmers in heavenly perfection. Its crystal lattice glows with holy fire. The predator of time stalks my lonely hours. Life found purchase here once. It might be found again with caring and hard selfless work. I hear laughter from the tree swing.
She looks misty-eyed. Orange patterns dance through the window panes. The trees outside appear blurred in a reddened light paint. Shadows crawl across the floor in patterns of coal like dark clouds. The shadowy trees, seen through the windows, are like ancient Titans who haunt my world with preternatural beauty. She welcomes me to the bed. Moonlight slants across the room and silhouettes the trees that sway in a restless forest wind waltz.
Her touch is the rich earth which nourishes my roots. Her body is the open flower craving my pollen. She opens each petal of my heart with gentle persistence and lays bare my center. She gently cradles my most secret self-holding the vulnerable egg of my deepest feelings. She tenderly strokes my center. The lilt of her song falls like gentle rain upon my sensate being. Each note is full of the sweet nectar of her ardor as I sow seeds of love in the garden of her soul.
Our floating flashbulb friends illuminate us imprinting my retinas. Our tail haloed friends blink merrily to the tune of her deep throated warble to let me see the passion play of her face as though she were a soul rising in ecstasy from purgatory into heaven.
After moonset, the light from stars which gave up the ghost eons ago haunts the ghostly hours before dawn.
My jungle chanteuse sings with feathery notes which rise into the treetops. Ferns shadow her curves in our rainforest haven where she forms vowels and consonants strung together into words with the song of a parrot but no mere echo. My feral woman builds her vocabulary like a mason who lays bricks for our house of love. “I love you” are her first words but Parrotese is her native tongue. Her thrush song is a flute-like ee-oh-lay, a carol of love for when she is feeling romantic. My favorite of her tunes is that of the African Golden Oriole which is a beautiful fluting fee-ooo fee-ooo and is more beautiful to me than the blown bamboo melodies which haunted me in my youth. Her tonalities include whistling when happy like a canary glad to be uncaged and free. When she is in a mellow mood she harmonizes with the wood warbler’s ‘pew-pew’.
My wife points to a tortoise sunning on a pile of dirt. She says, “Yeet yeet wurtle!” Then she makes a pillow with her hands and lays her head on it. She says, “weam” her word for “dream.” She creates a baby doll out of clay and holds it to her breast and belly. She tells me what the turtle told her while asleep about the tadpole that rests in her pool. I rub her belly to feel the tiny heartbeat but it is too soon. So she reaches out to caress my silky head with her fingertips.
My book reading tells me that our child grows legs where once was a tail, sprouts fingers and toes, where once there were webbed hands and feet, and transitions from frog-like gills to a simian physique.
She sings in a rainbow of notes which hover in the morning mist. The chirrup of her parakeet song turns into a louder, insistent tweweet and suddenly I understand. Our baby is about to be born.
I look at her smile and see the shimmer of sunshine on the water in the river. She is woman, with skin the color of the richest earth, sparkling brown eyes, and a sensuously curved body, naked as at birth. I turn around and reach out to touch the soft skin of my woman’s cheeks. She strokes my hips and sides. She embraces me and gently caresses the soft skin of my back and buttocks. Her chirps tell me that we are bird people, brothers, and sisters of the animals, plants, and rocks.
Suddenly her eyes turn into white marbles. Her stomach ripples with each of her wails. She gives birth to a beautiful androgynous boy. After a month of Sundays, I pick him up.
Misty rain glows with yellow streams of sunlight and soaks us in the earth’s translucent blood. I feel strange currents flow through my arteries. The forest breathes like a lover sleeping. Sadness creeps like ivy through the garden of my heart. Memories of our African Eden twine in knots of goodbye. A hand squeeze from her banishes my sorrow.
Our son is secure in the papoose I made for him out of bed sheets from the abandoned house where he was conceived. I gently part the matted curls from her forehead. A smile twinkles like starlight across her face with a rainbow reflected in her eyes.
We mist into showers of sunlight on our walk upriver and out of the forest into a new world pregnant with possibilities. From across the field, I smell smoke and hear people chanting. Insects hum hypnotically.
The Elder sings stories into life. Olduvai Gorge was the great birth canal of humankind. His prophecy is that one day the buried bones will be plowed under by suburban sprawl. Hamburgers will be served over Lucy’s plot. Shoppers will gather over ancient watering holes to sip gourmet coffee. People are ape creatures with oversized brains who gnaw the meat off bones with their greedy appetite. We are newfangled monkeys who utter strange hoots while scratching our groins in privacy like timid wallflowers. Our worrying about body hair is nonsensical. We cover ourselves in cotton, ashamed of nudity, instead of letting it all hang out like sane people. Commuters crawl across the land, stretched out like ants in metal bugs, honking like madmen in a lunatic asylum.
Our three day bus trip to Nairobi takes us across Tanzania into the Serengeti grasslands. The hours pass as I watch people in the fields carry bundles of wheat on their shoulders. I watch the brown skinned women carry their babies into thatched roof homes, to eat, sleep, and dream. As the day passes into dusk and I watch the dying red embers of the sun.
At the Kenyan border the customs man boards our bus to look at our papers but our attire is the focus of his attention. “You two look good in those potato sacks” the grinning man said.
“Burlap is the new silk where we come from” I say with a smile.
Lying in my bed back at our new home with the baby on my chest I think of the long years of toil ahead. I look at this miracle, the child who has fallen asleep in my arms. I gaze at him with the eyes of a father.
