The First Step
You pull me into intimacy so deep
Escalating like a cold war
Or a twelve year old’s dare to
The girl next door…
What piece of me more
Can I give to you?
What secret stone left
To turn, and take a peek?
I search within myself through
Uncharted caverns because
Truth pulls with a power stronger
Than anything I’ve ever known before
Is this what its like when God calls?
Is this what lies beyond
Your brilliant smile or the
Luxurious luster in your eye?
How can I come closer to there?
Without forcing the space from
Between the electrons of You
Or killing Me in the process?
The mine shaft drops…
Beauty Myth
Do you think that women with long fingernails ever touch themselves?
When I stand before you with stick free lips and pure skin face
Less the eyeliner, empty of anything the great THEY deem as beautiful upon my face
Know that the greatest aphrodisiac of all is self-confidence
When men say we are beautiful or I love you a thousand times
Will the sweetness of their voices erase the images of airbrushed playboy perfection?
Or will the distraction of blemish, or fat, of gray hair, of stretchmark, or line upon the face
Destroy our ability to be totally free with ourselves, free with you
Accept me then for who I am, lover of life
Lover of you, lover of my own mind body and soul
And let me stand tall knowing that the greatest aphrodisiac of all
Is this self –knowledge that I share with you.
In Praise of Artists
I remember when I was pregnant
And a midwifery student
A feminist, a mother, a wife
A woman who paved her way in the world
From the inside out, a stay at home mom
Raising her son to understand love and power
And respect for women through story
I knew that my body was growing beautiful
I had seen pictures of this, followed my hands
Along the breadth of stretched bellies
I knew the glory of these hormones
That eased my ligaments into stretching
Beyond what any yoga could have taught them
From the inside, from deep within the DNA
The blueprint of life and probably a bit beyond that
And yet, even as I knew these things it was hard
to erase the underlying prevailing lessons
Of fat that grow in the word of a young girl
Hard to erase visions of perfections,
scraps from the body project
Of "This dress does nothing for your figure…
so you shouldn’t wear it"
No matter how many oversized pairs of overalls
had been worn
And even as my mind knew these things and even as I fought
To reinvent the world, reinvent the body project
I was helpless. The stuff was deep, so deeply buried in places
That I couldn’t even see from my perspective, so close to it all
And that was about the time my gay roommate Mike could see
That the thing any girl should do, no matter what sex,
So he gave me the number to the Summit Art Center
And I let them paint me, draw me, sculpt me
And suddenly the body project was not mine anymore
But that of God’s in the hands of the artists
They saw and found things within me, I, Couldn’t see
They gave me eyes from which to step back a few
To know the inspiration beyond the DNA
Beyond bone or fat or opinions
Years later when I started to paint myself
I began with pregnant photographs
And my only Regret was that I never bought
any of the paintings from these first artists
that had changed my view of myself