I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 55
I LOVE the sex-passion which is in this witching Body of me. I love to feel its portent grow and creep over me, like a climbing vine of tiny red roses, in the occasional dusks.
It is no shame or shadow or sordidness: but beauty and sweetness and light.
no token of sin: a token of virtue.
no thing to crush: rather to nurture, to garner.
no thing to forget: to remember, to think about.
no flat weak drawn-out prose: live potent clipped heated poetry.
not common and loosely human: rare and divine.
not fat daily soup: stinging wine of life.
not valueless because born of nothing and nowhere: valuable, priceless, a treasure under lock and key.
Sex-desire comes wandering in dusk-time and gulfs me as in a swift violent sweet-smelling whirlwind. It goes away sudden-variant as it came, out of a region of hot quick shadows.
And for that, for hours and days afterward, oranges and apples look brighter-colored to my eyes: hammocks swing easier as I sit in them: rugs feel softer to my feet: the black dresses lend themselves gentler to my form: pencils slide faciler on paper: my voice speaks less difficultly into telephones: meanings sound super-vibrant in Keats's Odes: sugar—little pinches of granulated sugar—are shaper, sweeter-sweeter in my throat.
And God grows less remote. And my wooden coffin and deep wet yellow clay grave move a long way back from me.
—all from fleeting ungratified wish of sly sex-tissues—
Also in it, and in my life from it, I sense some deathly pathos.