from Apostrophe, an excerpt, Zones 6 and 7

As a photographer and son of a sculptor, I've devoted my entire life to "seeing with intent," an act absorbed first at Pop's knee and in all my subsequent studies. It is an engaged process that informs my work and is a link to my departed father. I guess you can say it's in my genes and in my blood. Recently I read this piece at The Erotic Literary Salon which I wrote about four years ago. It is an excerpt from Apostrophe, part of the first chapter, inspired by Ansell Adams' Zone System.  The Zone System demands intense, intimate observation and decisions made by the photographer based on what light reveals and conceals.  But for me, it is more. It is meditation, metaphor and birthright. It is how I express my love for and admiration of the wonders of the female form. Let the words wash over you.

I prayed to have some response to the things that were so clearly beautiful to me.

Leonard Cohen

Zone 6 Shadows on landscape

In the streets and studios on the campus and the city, desire, age and experience had honed this most talented eye. The photographer takes her in so quickly and discretely that he knows her most intimate details before she knows she’s revealed anything. Most men, heterosexual or not, do this or a form of it but to call his lifelong pursuit “girl-watching” insinuates a certain passive amateurism for this most professional and most practiced of investigators. 

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Hearts and Flowers

A certain lady sexologist of whom we're fans has a nightly routine in which she and her lover exchange sweet, explicit "nothings." Signora V and  I recently had just such an exchange. Is it sweet? Is it nothing? I'll leave it to readers to judge.

-------V-------------
My special request

Love, this is a darker side of my personality that has not been as yet revealed to you though I know you suspect me. As a one-off and never to be repeated scenario I request the following.

To be driven to a dark park at night when I am tired and ready for bed and be forced out of the car and thrown against the ground, (on a very warm night, mind), have my jeans and panties pulled down to my knees and my top pulled up over my breasts and have clamps fixed tightly onto my nipples so that they swell. Then with one hand on my back holding me down firmly I want you to force me, however tired I am at the moment, to let you take me from behind in my special hole. I will resist and finally acquiesce because you are so obviously stronger than me. I may be resentful at the time and the burning feeling that I will experience in my butt will stay with me for the hours to follow.  I will afterwards feel a kind of liberation by being taken in the dark outdoors against my will.

This is the second night I’ve written this request. What may I assume?

-------R-------------

I've opened my special file of pictures of you. As I page through them, I frame my response.

What may you assume?
Assume this.
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The Jealous Muse

by Riccardo Berra © 6-1-2010

She perched on the arm of his chair. When she'd first arrived, he'd been amazed that she could, but she'd stay like that for hours and he never minded. Except for her constant whisper in his head, he almost forgot she was there. She, so light, so delicate, could insinuate herself into the tiniest of spaces. She'd be what, all of 4'11", all of a hundred pounds wet? She had the final printout of his newest novel. She was wearing a diaphanous orange and ochre sundress. No bra or panties. What need has a Muse for undergarments?

She read incredibly fast and each page she finished, she flipped contemptuously to the floor. He'd not let her read the final draft until after he proofed it. He never let anybody read his work until he finalized it. He'd assumed at first that that's what she was being so pissy about, but something else was bothering her. The pages accumulating on the floor were numbered, thank God, but this was getting pretty fucking irritating. He made to swat her butt, but she became, well, it was like swatting cigarette smoke.

"This is your ideal woman?"

She was furious, rattling the remaining pages she held.

"Ideal in what way?"

"Ideal in the way of her perfect physique. Her perfect submission to you. Your perfect lover. I could be this for you."
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Specular Highlights

Copyright 2010 rbb/apostrophe, all rights reserved
by Riccardo Berra

Naomi was with Sean, an A-list soundman and personal friend that Riccardo hired whenever he could. Riccardo adored his friend, but had always had the hots for Naomi. He kept this to himself. Then Sean left Naomi and New York for a NPR staff job in New Orleans that Riccardo with his contacts, had helped him land. In Sean’s absence, shortly after the birth of his daughter, Riccardo began a desperate affair with the 26 year old waitress and aspiring veterinarian. That’s the simplest chain of events, but chronology is where all simplicity ends.

Sean’s departure was quietly orchestrated to cauterize the raw end of a love affair that had careened from bad to worse most years, now headlong toward a crash into multiple flair-ups of physical and emotional abuse. Riccardo had been a patient intermediary and confidante to both parties. It was so indescribably hard for him to reconcile what he felt and what he knew of this couple. Most nights that the three of them were together, it was the Sean and Naomi show, starring Sean who could tear a Nagra down blindfolded with a live joint in his mouth and make you laugh to the point of pissing with his Don Rickles send-ups of stars and scenes from his photographic recall of classic film and TV. Then there was straight-man Naomi, broody and impulsive, with her whip-smart mouth and soft bleeding heart, this patroness of stray dogs, cats and all pitiful creatures. Strange, contradictory outcast souls, but then so is Riccardo.

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constellations

10/4/2009

Walking this path I’ve taken so many times before
I pass people who contemplate sunset over the river
Their faces high contrast to the subtler shades of dying light
Burnt golds, brick reds, shimmer
 lending to magenta and violet,
My meditation is my motion past them
The song of blood in my fingertips
The pump of my footsteps on pavement
My steady heart, my fickle head
Rare in truce, constant in opposition
This trembling asymmetry
My quavered note of regret
That I
Recall all my loves
But forget my best ideas
Rising, slippery, Excalibur bright,
Graspable only by the blade before they slide under the surface line
Down, down
They settle in the silt
Only to play hint
Of their outline
Even then
If I could only stop and look
But I couldn’t

To late
Gone now.
Sunk down
My most familiar refrain
That now I grasp
Not at the original, but at its iteration
While the real treasure
Sleeps
Shell of a man
Shells of notions
Litter shorelines
I’ll never walk under cold stars I’ll never see,
Washed above and below by oceans
of unrequited depth and rhythm.

This August night
This propagated parkway
This illuminated diagonal
That disappears beneath my feet
As the sun long set and the moon risen
Takes up her rondo with Mars

In a tight line round the skyline palace of the Blue Cross
Never closer in the millennial memory of men
He the larger, so removed, so distant and expressionless
She the smaller, frail gray, reflecting all, saving so little for herself
But a sad, fixed half-smile

Yet here on the parkway,
They are together, tight in the sky
Their proportions inversed
Their attraction irrefutable
How is that possible?
So unlike these two
That if she could but go to him, or he to her,
Calamitous
Tides would still
Lovers would cease to croon
Mountains would swell and spit
Broad planes yawn
ash, fire and smoke
All would be lost but
But what care these two for the abstemious license of men
For our offkey songs and stuttered lines
For if they can never claim their truest desires
What care they of ours?
rbb 2010 all rights reserved ... This post continues!

Whatever That

Whatever that has you but wants you
Wants that longing of adjacent flesh impatient
You cannot move fast enough
to cover all of me that needs all of you
Sighs
Mothman flickers of fluorescent envy
You under me legs yawn like a hungry mouth at which
I’ll feed till my love declines to corruption
Wet by friction bound by its opposite
Kisses rain like glasses falling from a high shelf
a soft tinkle
a dimpled promontory
a deep cleft
Bereft
I made my way with you when cooler counsel said fool not
I should’ve shuffled on to the hollow steady thrum
that was my life, my late life, my dying life
and now it is too late for anything
but spin and fall and sin and fall
regretless
Awake your mouth moves on me
An impression
Of twin tunnels met in an airy illusion of endless bounty
The salt sea scent of sin
Confederate arms
Desperate eyes
Empty hearts
It won’t be our bed tonight
Not without me in it.

rbb 1/18/10 all rights reserved ... This post continues!

skin

Yesterday’s shirt
Still has your smell on it.
I rub myself
And my hand to my face declares
That it held your apple sex
My lips confess your taste
How can the world be so unaware that we’re lovers
When six ounces of fabric tell the whole story?

An afternoon with you and I feel my skin again
Everything glows
The scaled surface scrubbed
Pumice raw
Sand devils scuttle cross sun-blind fields
Cracked crust, thistles, bleached bone, tumbleweeds

Make the language larger
Make the hair stand up
On the back of my neck

How did the world not see me?
The biggest invisible thing in the room
Fine with it, till now
God as my witness
I will make a mighty splash
Before I jump
Jump
Out of my skin

rbb 2004 all rights reserved ... This post continues!