Blackberries in the Dream House

Chapter 23: Filled with Moonlight

Sometimes my voice is a bird weaving through the forest. She's yellow, but she doesn't have a name. I write the pictographic shapes of my voice in calligraphy on rice paper. I draw the moon through layers of bamboo, brush blossoms on a branch of hibiscus, and uncover a secret landscape I see only in my dreams.

But I want to paint something different now. A dragon or a human body. I don't know how to do that yet. It would involve a translation to paint of what I see with my hands. The paint would have to start with touch, then move through the eyes, and back to a world of light and shadow.

Poetry is easier sometimes. I like being made love to with words. I like the way they swirl around me and take their shape in my fingers. Or in the shape of your mouth behind my knees. Sometimes language clears the path for its own intention, the way a dream can reshape a life.

I paint the way I touch you in the moonlight. This isn't something I can explain with words. I can only do it with my hands or in the cryptic language of a dream. The dream could become a poem. The man would be in the soft skin of the letters, and she would feel it whenever she wanted him to caress her.

I want to paint Kenji's words in moonlight around his body. I want to paint the shape of his voice. His voice saying, "When you touch me, it's like going through the moon." I see him in the forest walking through a tangle of branches. I paint him in sumi-e colors, layers of ink on skin, moon brushed. The moon swims out of his skin like flying fish through a silver tunnel.

My mouth is filled with moonlight until every part of your body is loved and touched. The sky is ink and your face is rising over the eastern mountains. Your mouth is filled with a sacred language, syllables you sing to me over and over while we are making love. I want you to love me with paint until my shoulders are filled with moonlight.

My edges are translucent. My kisses touch you like violets in a light rain.