LIGNE CLAIRE

by Riccardo Berra 2010 (c) all rights reserved

We live in such instructive times. There are manuals and guides for everything. For your first period—"The Period Book: Everything You Don't Want to Ask (But Need to Know)." For your first sexual experience—the books of Suzi Landolphi.  For more advancing sexuality—"Our Bodies, Ourselves" and any issue of Cosmo. An expectant mother reads "What to Expect While You're Expecting," then the endless tomes on parenting in all its interminable stages, but what, pray tell, gives comfort to the 50-something gal who is vanishing?

Perhaps I already have. Invisibility doesn't happen all at once. It's more of a slow motion tumble down a cliff.

My darling Missy. It breaks Mommy's heart, tween Missy staring so deep and sincere in my eye, promising, cross her precious little heart, that she'd always share her most intimate secrets with me. Teen Missy won't even make eye contact and divulges nothing. When I enter the room or catch her eye in the hallway at school, her nose crinkles as if I'm a passing bad odor.  Do I smell bad?

My darling Curt. Never, I've concluded after 17 years of marriage, was a man more aptly named, for he passes by and through me like air. Before Missy was born, he was a sex fiend. We both were, God, so shamelessly young and hot for each other, hands grasping crotches, tunneling under skirts and through panties, fingers pinching nipples, tongues in throats.  Everything everywhere. Parked cars, hiking paths, broom closets, kitchen tables, once in a museum bathroom, in other people's bedrooms, our own occasionally, leaving love's evidence trails on Mother's Persian and best chaise longue, me bent over, rump up, screaming as he pounded into me—whenever, wherever we felt like it. We weren't exhibitionists—at least blatant ones. We were just uninhibited, in love and saw only each other. Nobody else mattered. But life has gotten its revenge and now it's me that doesn't matter.

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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

I’ve taken this path so many times before
I pass people who in contemplating sunset over the river
Reveal their silhouettes
In such stark contrast to the subtler shades of dying light
Rich burnt gold, pedestrian brick red, these waver and fade
To magenta and violet,
My meditation, my motion is 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 quivering, uncomfortable asymmetry
So much to regret, such as
That I
Recall all my loves
But forget my best ideas
Rising, slippery, Excalibur bright,
But graspable only by the razor edge of the blade
Before they slide under the surface line
To settle in the silt of oblivion
Only to tease hint
Of their outline
Even then
If I could only stop and look
The delusion I can rescue what was there but once
But I couldn’t and I can't

To late
Gone now.

My most familiar refrain
That now I grasp
Not at the original, but at its rusted iteration
The real treasure
Sleeps untouched
Shells of a man
Shells of notions
Litter shorelines under alien stars
I’ll never see.

This August night
This propagated parkway
This illuminated diagonal
Radiation beneath my feet
As the sun long set and Moon new risen
Takes up her rondo with Mars

In a tight line round the mark of the Blue Cross
Never closer in the millennial memory of men
He Mars, the larger, so removed, so bellicose
She Moon, the smaller, imprisoned, reflecting all, saving so little for herself
But a broken, fixed half-smile

Yet here on the Parkway,
They are improbably tight in the sky
Their proportions inversed
Their attraction shocking but irrefutable
Does he mean to steal her
Rape her.
Kidnap and dash her in his bloody orbit?
Doesn't she know

His red red love isn't kind. It's bestial
Doesn't she know
That if she could but go to him, or he to her,
Calamity would follow
Tides would still

Mountains would groan and bulge like pregnant cows
Earth herself would split
An episiotomy birthing the end of
All tiny antlike Lovers who croon
And make sad songs for Sister Moon.

Don't you ever wonder
What care these two
For the abstemious license of Earthbound lovers and losers
For our offkey songs and lust spluttered lines
For if they who dance in this August sky
Can never claim their truest desires

What care have 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!