On skin

I've been meaning to tell you something about beauty. No. This is not one of those cheesy letters that you're supposed to read when you're sixteen or something. I'm living between grace and glory and sort of hedging my bets with the Mayan calendar. That is only to say that those sorts of things are presumptions, guesses. If you have something to say it's best to speak now.

All right, so, I have this pithy sort of quote that's been tumbling around in my head for a time. I'm not certain that it's accurate, but it's pithy. And I'm a sucker for things that sound just right. In the afternoon she cries in her yellow room as the refrigerator hums. I've been watching the light through the blinds flicker in the fronds of ferns. If she stops crying I'll listen to car motors three streets away.


The average adult has 22 feet of skin, or, roughly enough to fill up a doorway. If you're picturing a doorway of skin like I am, stop. I don't enjoy horror movies.

They say that Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships. I think we're roughly talking a couple of feet there. So, if it only took two feet of skin to launch a thousand ships just think what we could do with 22?

She coughs. Is it a meaningful I'm awake sort of cough, or a, hey, I'm thinking of sleeping up here, and I just want to get out this last cough cough.

Some of the Biblical narratives do not blame David for seducing Bathsheba. It is fair to say that, seeing all 22 feet of skin he was sort of at her mercy.

She's either clapping or smacking the wall and imitating the calls of monkeys. Sleep is an unconscious gesture of love from child to parent.

For a while she carries a blanket around occasionally placing it over her head and laughing hysterically as she falls. Children are a reminder of the past etched in the stones of the future.

I wonder if the great conversation that the mind carries on with itself is great after all. Perhaps it is just the murmur of someone gone mad.

The term, huzzah.

She is imitating the sounds of squirrels. We are not sleeping.

Skin is all we have to go on, underneath we have too much in common.

In the bright yellow room the plants wave their arms at the grace of central heating.

An easy google search will take you to the secret affairs of Ghandi, which obviously were not secret enough. The flesh is either weak or strong depending on your perspective.

In February of 1847 members of the Donner party survived by living on the flesh of the dead. We can presume that upon reaching the safety of warmer CA they were either rounded up and shot as zombies or began careers writing graphic novels. Forty eight members of the party survived, and I can see that they could teach us about skin, about beauty.

I remember the curve of your hip rising from smooth skin.

after, we’d lie awake and reflect on the aesthetics of a backlit clavicle and the island of shadow in the crease where hip meets waist.

I've lost the thread as you can tell. She is still calling to the ceiling in her despair, not aware yet of the vastness of a universe that is not particularly attentive. Her skin is smooth and young. Perhaps the object lesson is none at all.