Posts tagged with "beauty"

Believing In Her Beauty

The torso of my beautiful muse

I tell her she’s beau­ti­ful. Over and over again. As often as I can.

But she shakes her head, and says I only think so because I love her.

The front of my beautiful muse

It’s true. But would I love her any less if she did­n’t have those soft, inno­cent eyes? If she did­n’t wear her hair up, or down, or curly, or straight, or dif­fer­ent every time I saw her? If her body did­n’t curve so dis­tract­ing­ly when she lets her­self fall into me?

The body of my beautiful muse

It makes me won­der if any­one sees the same thing that I do.

How much of it is her beau­ty, and how much of it is the beau­ty I see in her?

To me, her beau­ty is obvi­ous, not sub­tle in any way.

The legs of my beautiful muse

So I tell her, over and over again.

Sometimes I think she’ll start to believe me if I say it enough.

I Found Her

The woman I’ve been look­ing for my entire life.

Her name was Christine. She was thin lipped. Frail limbed. Not the least bit cam­era shy, as she pulled her shirt up to expose a breast, like she had fall­en on the grass this way and the folds in her clothes rearranged them­selves on her body.

Here she is on a horse in the night. Here she is, grim-faced, cradling her son. There was a scar on her neck from a sui­cide attempt years ear­li­er, and through a series of pho­tographs, you could see the scar heal.

For sev­en years she was mar­ried, before she suc­cess­ful­ly jumped to her death from the 9th floor of an apart­ment in East Berlin.

A blink in my eye, a snap of some­one else’s shut­ter. A muse of flesh and blood. The Jane Birkin to Serge Gainsbourg. The Olga Ivinskaya to Boris Pasternak.

This is some­one who under­stood his art, his mor­bid­i­ty, his need to cap­ture her sui­cide in a frame, then pub­lish the image of her body on the pave­ment, look­ing down from the 9th floor, along with insou­ciant pic­tures of a teacup, a play­ground, a tank, three plants.

And as soon as I had found her, she’s gone.

Should I be hap­py that she exist­ed? Should I be sad that she’s gone? Should I be pun­ished for com­par­ing the women I’ve had to her?

Is this painful, or beau­ti­ful, or both?