Mountains

I am as unstudied at the topography of the the land I live in as I am unlettered in the vocabulary needed to describe a woman's body. I know few words for these stretching, reaching prairies that gave our settlers the feeling of vastness, of abundance, of possibility lifting the eyes from the dust and clods of the furrow to the horizon, still and moving outwards at the sun's rising and at its setting. Yet I know enough that with the land's flatness, there are always movements, dips, undulations that beckon; fecund, bending, curving spaces that ring of birth and growing. The man who wrote of the fruited plain must have been desk bound or too frightened by the size of his task to allow it to take him; and "purple mountains' majesty" feels barely redeemed by its restraint.
But lieing with a woman made me think of mountains. The bones rising up under the flesh, the opening, soft wetness, the warmth between them. Not only mountains but also a big snake like river, brown and easy, uncoiling slowly in the sun, moving with a certainty of being there and reaching and going onwards, moving me with it, sometimes slowly, relentless like a barge, carrying tonnage out of the land; sometimes a darting trembling motion like water tossing over rocks or quickening through a narrow turn. I have felt how the river is never stopped, runs against somthing and turns back on itself, turning again until it is round or over it, resisting nothing, moving on. I think of mist rising out of valleys, of the mystery of light finding its way between the shadowy blankets of trees, deep into the low places, causing the mist to thin and burn away.
Sweetest is being held by a woman, when she takes in the seed as the earth takes seed in the spring, dark, crushed in mud, enveloping and wrapping me into darkness, softly, sweetly holding everything so that ideas of being some one or something fade as light fades. The landscape loses its contours and dimensions and the mountains and the valleys give themselves over to night feelings, to the unknown, secret promises of the dark.
But maybe there is no land so soft and smooth, so full of honey and sweetness as this place of the beloved where I arrive still clinging to a sense of belonging and depart with no notion of compass, border or boundary; where constellations whirl and where for this moment even the North star is lost with the rest.