arielle

Susan Moul

she would stay/ when she said she was going when/ I listened I would touch inside the arch of her bare foot with the sweet tip of my index finger she just wanted to talk I/ have to go she’d say she would look at her watch she would stay the light would change on her skin as hours entrained by the sun pulled the day across her face and sometimes even night the curtain of streetlamps coming on it was solstice the sky would hold the next town’s sunset like a lamp until the evening turned green above the lake

arielle was always by design/ a schemer but I’d/ get within a foot of her and everything would go out of the monochromatic world of her strategies and/ into/ into the beginning of beauty

set out from the shore to the sea by that star and not by the map of her words because she had this whole vocabulary she/ had the knowledge of conjuring she understood / where she went describing ahead of embracing my body with her arms she traced a limit / by a motion of language/ in order to constrain her/ desire

and the words she used were top and bottom/ topping and getting topped and wanting to be which her body her/ body had no interest in this because lets be clear I was with her/ body me and arielle-in-her-body we/ were making a run for the border

~
arielle’s lust is transformative/ it comes straight into my body powerfully from hers I/ put my mouth on hers and that’s the last thing I have to do/ her hands and mouth open me open me/ I find a whole new language and it’s my own/ in the way that I touch her and in the way that I move/ sexually/ female/ her hours of talking have been so naked that being completely hungry seems not to have any shame attached to it

she says something about waves of love and lust/ but at the moment it’s just that I kiss her/ I see myself do it and then I do it/ I feel like I am following myself I/ have listened her to the edge of what she knows in herself and then I take her over

shameless/ I move with direct appetite against her/ I look into her eyes and hide nothing and I receive the same full on I want to fuck you until you can’t walk look from her/ we

make out in an entirely unbridled way/ new between us inventive/ though we’re exhausted can hardly keep our eyes open as we struggle out of clothes touching into the corners of what is possible/ coming back over and over again to mouth and fingers the irresistible undertow of her hips moving backward drawing me between them her belly breaking curved upon mine

wow she says who knew she says
maybe I’m just going to blow through all of this stuff

the stuff of her conversation the lying the fear the prevarication the projection the self-hatred the misogyny the homophobia the anger the loathing the wordlessness

she tells me she/ feels like a man/ she says I mean I am saying to myself arielle you are a pig/ there is this very masculine energy she/ says and I like it/ I like how it felt to be with you that way/ that’s all she says and for just that moment the door is open

what do I know there/ is a lust that is something generative and sacred/ not smutty not dirty/ we no longer have a word that once must have existed in the time of the Great Mother a word for pure heat/ sacred honored /of body

a lover’s desire belongs to me/ the way corn grows in the sun/ or animals upon green grasses

and the intimacy of that/ it seemed to come from my will or saying so/ it seemed to be my power that bestowed and engendered it/ sacrament

my touch on arielle’s breast / how can I put this into words/ the femininity of the power/ the full-bodied desire of it/ to release that through my hands/ I hadn’t thought of that before/ but as I was touching arielle

it seemed of a consistency with the hand of the goddess

when we slept together that night/ we really slept together/ I wanted to be close to her body/ something honest had happened between us/ unfettered and uncensored and it seemed to me vulnerable/ and unlike the other nights where I slept at the edge of the bed with my body twitching/ last night/ this morning / those few hours/ I felt hunger coursing through my sleep/ just wanting to touch her anywhere

~
part of coming out/ it

was part of the dynamic/ that I was neither butch nor femme and / it was unacceptable to be this neither both that I was

and I was a bit aggressive a bit hostile about the advice given to make up my mind or forever never attract the kind of woman I would want

to be wanted by I

could not put my hand to the myth that I wanted/ the Mother/ the archetype
the path walked before me had been silenced in some interim of civilization/ and the

fragments those marks/ of force left behind in the imperative of erasure somewhere become a thing named as l- / before that we were

outside and not of and not parsed by

who were these women I found myself among/ come there to be sorted and ruled who/ had arrived at the threshold for the categories of things and not the dance

had I been a warrior some life I had memories of/ a bow a spear which I could throw at a run broad arc of my body opening beneath it and the torque of the release to flight that was of my hand and my breath of my belly and hips I remember/ the turn of my hips

and that’s what I wanted with a woman

did this remonstration definition consternation constriction construction cutting down to size putting into place naming away the shape of my nature-al desire self being-ness shape shifting by women of women for women remind me yes it did of my mother

saying I couldn’t use tampons by which I might inadvertently deflower myself and how important that was to men me as a woman not being deflowered them wanting to do that themselves was it the deflowering per se or the getting in there first the not following some other man into my ditch

my rage that she wanted it to be herself who gave me to one of them preserved by her for their purposes this perversity from her smashmouthface I think of my mother whenever I see those ferocious women of de kooning’s the gory fury of never having come into one’s own body and denying it violently to one’s own children women among women saying no

come here do as I say

the one who comes is femme is bottom the one who says is butch is top

so which are you they wanted to know and I wasn’t

fifteen I lay on my back on the floor of the door locked bathroom and mirror in hand perpetrated a future upon myself I

got up and left the house of my mother

woe followed me on the path that I was / story and truth I/ will kiss who I will/ kiss I
will love who/ I will love and I will pay the price of/ what I choose I

will not be denied

how do you know who you are until you are in my arms what/ would I want/ with what you have decided before/ what you know already/ with that blank to be filled in your
pre scrip tion I

am life

and I will be known by being lived

you look at me a girl thing my parts fit your bill what is it you want with what’s already spoken what kind of a thing will you do and call it sex

sex because it’s genital
sex because it’s oral
sex because it’s war on your anger I
can’t give you these things won’t

you say that you love women
come to me and I will tell you what a woman is I
will tell you with the mouth of my body

she said to me we are both too femme it isn’t going to work I didn’t argue with her I
took off my clothes I felt her move under me and knew

bringing out a woman the nerve of that and the joy of it the power of it that I got off on how much it was freaking her out that in the very same expression of saying absolutely not/ she was there at the edge looking for me

it did not matter to me I did not

care by how much she fell short or why/ of what she said she wanted I gave my body to her/ effort to name something of her own as honesty to peg it out even faithlessly broken handed and to throw herself at that target from a moving car

me stealing upon arielle’s body the night she betrayed me the night of the day when we ate the chocolate in the forest me bleeding so heavily

how in the forest I walked down among the ferns the winding boughs the sunlight holographic embraces everywhere around me I knelt and pulled the plug from between my legs I squatted and bled onto the forest floor the back of my orange brushed cotton skirt painted bled upon red upon

moss floor and blood and the sound of birds and feeling of air under my thighs

back in the jeep we ate the chocolate we had with us chocolate several flavors intense from a chocolate store that arielle favored and we had before that gone to market and bought armloads of groceries for a stir fry that evening for dinner for cooking for eating and making love for time together I was still caught up in the field around her arielle the water daughter the possibility of priestesses together beyond the first manifestation this waking life we were like trees and those green carved banks of sun where I squatted to bleed on the floor the moss the mud the dirt the fine loam of leaves and seasons the places where deer stepped delicate and cloven the habits of rain and rock squatted there and bled the whole rich clot of menses convulsing warm with the heat of my womb surging from between my red smeared thighs the power of my feet on the earth where I bled the bonding of the forest spirit and my breath inhale exhale and blood and sunlight and the air moving

what does it mean when someone thinks never again of the things between one and someone you could say it meant nothing that whatever came before was imagined was held by one and not someone

you could say it you could watch someone’s face to see if she suffered to see if it was nothing

you could know inside that to never think again of a thing which happened physically so delightfully so mouth in the shape of the opening of ones mouth and someone’s mouth finding o finding the perfection and chasing it falling after it mouth over mouth one could look at someone and decide it cannot happen without someone and one it cannot happen in one’s own mind and so perhaps it is happening still in someone’s body and she blinks it back she holds it down she holds her breath and can go on desiccated desecrated redescribed just like that and

she isn’t anymore someone at all

she said she said as she wanted to begin the very last time on the bed in the motel room the decidedly squalid synthetic the cheapest tv the millionth fuck mattresses the rancid meal that prefigured us before she said as she wanted to begin as she was rolling slightly in the wind of desire toward me and away from me pulling like a kite in the back swell of her self hatred / later it was this do you think she said o she said I don’t even want to know the answer to this do you think she said is possible it’s all just I’m homophobic/ but then on the bed after the crying all the surface of both our skins vibrating and me I had put my body in the place where I could know everything naked against her denial and her muscle of breast and withdrawal arcing into away from me do you ever she asked again feel like a man and I knew where we were we were in the place of the great truth and its lie the desire not to go where she wanted she wanted o wanted to go along the smooth endless curves of my existence on the white dead sheet the ubiquitous sheets of hospitals and morgues and motel rooms would I follow her the heat cranking noisily it was september and chilly no

that’s all I said

the night kept reaching under me as she slept until it slid me into my jeep I/ drove rte 100 north at 6 a m and it was magic/ fog and sunrise and just normal life beginning in every direction/ the corn high and there were sleepy headed school kids kicking along the shoulders of the places where the highway dragged through small towns and sometimes even parents standing drinking coffee waiting for the bus with their backpack brood/ it was all so reassuring

because I never I have never felt like a man when I am touching a woman I have never what can I say what could one tell someone who asked that you’re stalling I might have said you are letting your hatred into the bed with us and you want to pretend you can’t stop and maybe somewhere you can’t but I’m here and I have known the places where you did not stop small and interrupted as they ever were but I am going to ask you one more time the last time I/ know and you don’t know where/ we are I am doing an undoing with my body my sacred body now next to yours and you will never see again what you are seeing are lying against now you will never have this question before you again do you want to make love to me do you want to make love to me touch and caress me do you want to feel that power you have the thing that happens between us the inexplicable thing that erases for me the flaws of personality the little tininess of neurosis the games the prevarication the ridiculous the cowardice the not telling of honest things the withholding the choking and chaining and throttling of your knowing damn well all of that gone powdered sugar dusted flesh again flesh feeling the holy in the moment feeling

the night of the couch the night when I sat in the driveway three hours listening to you on the phone and then came in to use the bathroom and the seeing of your face the presence of your real and actual body after that marathon disembodied phonecall how it felt when you put your arms around me how we went to the couch and even your feet worked the possessive vise grip of you/ feet so satisfied with their importance in getting me somewhere along side you on the sad couch and when we began from there from then from the place of this design of how you held and looked at me you are beautiful you said to me god you are so beautiful which was only interrupted by the staccato laughter the shaking free of your mad hair and wry mouth o your mouth you are very cute you would say you are very cute and then kissing and pacing me until I got across you with my wildness in my eyes and licked your mouth and my mouth became

became

what am I going to say here how am I going to describe what I did with my mouth how it felt to be a woman who could do that with her o mouth and what I knew what made me free was to see that if you would not have this I would go on living I would find another after someone stopped wanting to know what one could do with her mouth in the straightforward matter of desire of expressing

o all of those things I had been afraid of before the violence of extremity no longer seemed important no longer seemed possible seemed like clichés all I was doing was kissing was turning you on so intensely that your face changed and changed ten seasons you were completely relaxed in the couch with your back propped up no strain on your body in charge and playing with me until you were so beyond who you knew yourself to be that it became serious you wanted what was happening you were at the edge of being in control and it was the first time that I released myself allowed myself/ what/ you would call it top but it had nothing to do with butch it had nothing to do with dominance it had everything to do with putting your desire where you could hardly say no to it

and your mind found your mouth and took it from me god what I’m thinking you said and I wiggled my cunt on top of you impatiently who cared about thinking god what thoughts are going through my head arielle you are filthy arielle you are a pig that’s what I am telling myself this energy feels masculine to me but I am totally enjoying it

topping was me taking you there being a woman and taking you there past the sentinels and the gates to the edge of the clearing to the moonlit broad field lay down with me lover open your mouth I will pour like wine I will set you free I will burn down your house I will be your woman I will be ever sovereign you cannot own me and with that you can have me I will ever give myself there are glens there are ferns there are embraces of sunlight there is a mist in the marsh in the moonlight moving between us

and I believed at that time that you would give in I believed no one who had felt what we felt would turn someone’s back toward it and seek it the slavery again someone did and one knew then what it meant to love a slave an addict a soul hollowed out

this is what’s done with the body the living of freedom the living of enslavement it is done with the body and I chose to be free

working notes

These pages are sections from a work in progress. Because I want a love story that conveys the primal territory of embodied love, of love in the body, because I want to show that love is not sentimental, “arielle” is a love story that employs the conventions of romance in order to subvert them. Girl meets girl, girls gets girl, girl loses girl, and in this tale, emerges with a stronger sense of agency, not a chastened sense of self. I am trying to write a love story that feels into the difficulty of love-courage and feels into trying for something real by wanting what actually is. I am writing a story whose lovers engage their desire with license, freely wanting what they want because they want it and not necessarily because it is good for them.

I especially wanted to write women who are not victimized by desire, not existentially or materially punished by giving into and/or engaging desire, or by struggling with the love that happens. Their fallible efforts toward sexual honesty don’t conventionally reward them or glorify an ideal of love, but rather show love as a torch lit by and leading further toward self knowledge.

I am especially insistent upon a refusal of polarity. Neither of the two women feels exploited; even in betrayal neither blames the other for her own needs., Each character is a woman refusing to trade her wildness away for security, refusing to answer to anyone else for her body or its desires, claiming them for her own wild purposes.

about the author

Susan Moul lived 22 years in Boston after a working class childhood in rural Pennsylvania. In 2002 when her son left home for college she moved to Vermont to write, spending part of every day outdoors in the mountains and most of every night reading Helene Cixous, Sharon Olds, and Eileen Myles aloud in a steamy bathtub – the only warm place in the barn she had rented. She is currently working, writing, and teaching at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Meditation in the Berkshires.