Borrowed Tongues

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published I want to watch you glide across a crowded room, the deliberate placement of each step, the way you draw every eye without trying. Da mi basia mille , give me a thousand kisses, wrote Catullus to his Lesbia, as if he too had witnessed how you tilt your head when listening, how your fingers trace the rim of your glass, warmth the sole evidence of touch. I want to follow the quiet curve where your shoulders begin, the shadowed inlet where your heart flutters beneath flesh, that hollow meant for whispers and salt. Glukupikron amachanon orpeton , sweetbitter, impossible to fight, Sappho scribed this centuries ago, knowing how the scent of you would linger on my clothes, how the music of your laugh would resurface hours later when I'm alone. I want to taste the heat of your skin after sleep, to trace with tongue the paths my fingers discover, to find where patience dissolves into urgency. Surata samavesha , the joining of bodies, sung in Vatsyayana's verses, as if he understood how your back would arch beneath my hands, how time calms itself when hips meet hips, how breath becomes both question and answer. I want to witness your careful composure unraveling, to witness the sounds that escape when control abandons you, to become the cause of your beautiful undoing. ﻛﻤﺎ ﻳﺬﻭﺏ ﺍﻟﻤﻠﺢ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺎﺀ , as salt dissolves in water, Ibn Hazm described the soul's dissolution in pleasure, as if he had seen how your eyes close just before release, how your fingers dig half-moons into my skin, how you become for moments utterly unconcerned with language. I want to inhabit the silence afterward, when bodies cool and thoughts resurface, when fingers trace idle patterns on damp skin. 物の哀れ , mono no aware, the pathos of things, this brief, exquisite impermanence that the Japanese poets understood when writing of fleeting beauty, knowing how your profile against the pillow would become memory even as I witness it. These words are not mine alone. I translate what bodies have spoken for millennia, borrowing phrases from dead tongues to say what feels so urgently present. When I trace desires across your skin, I write in things invented before my birth; when you respond with sighs and movements, you speak a language older still. Our wants echo through papyrus and stone, through songs and fragments that survived collapse. The ancients would recognize us immediately how little the body's hungers have changed, how consistent its vocabulary of pleasure. So when I say I want you, I speak with the voice of thousands before me, adding our verse to this never-completed poem of desire.