a brave, brilliant, and touching soul

motcon · Nov 4, 2004

she's a writer and even more a gypsy than even i; from spain, to oregon, to pennsylvania, to paris......in the last two years.

this is something that she sent to me. why? i'm not quite sure. we spent some time after the shoot talking over coffee and tea. perhaps she wanted to reveal to me a bit more about her. i'm not sure and i'll never know.

A piece of something I've been playing with...

When he says “Skins or blankets?” it will take you a moment
to realize that he’s asking which you want to sleep under. And in your hesitation he’ll decide that he wants to see your skin wrapped in the big black moose hide. He carried it, he’ll say, soaking wet and heavier than a dead man, across the tundra for two – was it hours or days or weeks?
But the payoff, now, will be to see it fall across one of your white breasts. It’s December, and your skin is never really warm, so you will pull the bulk of it around you and pose for him, pose for his camera, without having to narrate this moose’s death. You will spend every night in this man’s bed without asking why he listens to top-forty country. Why he donated money to the Republican Party. Why he won’t play back his messages while you are in the room. You are there
so often the messages pile up. Once you noticed the bright green counter reading as high as fifteen. He will have lured you here out of a careful independence that you spent months cultivating; though it will finally be the winter, the dwindling daylight, that makes you give in. Spending nights with this man means suffering the long face of your dog, who likes to sleep on your bed, who worries when you don’t come home. But the hunter’s house is so much
warmer than yours, and he’ll give you a key, and just like a woman, you’ll think that means something. It will snow hard for thirteen straight days. Then it will get really cold. When it is sixty below there will be no wind and no clouds, just still air and cold sunshine. The sun on the
windows will lure you out of bed, but he’ll pull you back under. The next two hours he’ll devote to your body. With his hands, with his tongue, he’ll express what will seem to you like the most eternal of loves. Like the house key, this is just another kind of lie. Even in bed, especially
in bed, you and he cannot speak the same language. The machine will answer the incoming calls. From under an ocean of passion and hide and hair you’ll hear a woman’s muffled voice between the beeps.