I Am Complimenting You
When I say a kind word it means that, of all the people in the world, I’ve chosen you: you’ve a wonderful bearing, you carry yourself as only you could. There is an arching of the back that occurs during the overhead press—it is an architectural moment where, for an instant and always moving, the body is a monument, and up up up the bar elevates skyward away from that stolid wonder left shaking in triumphal glory. In like wise you are the arch in the back, you are moving and still, and you are totally solid, real, unfilthy (Even if you haven’t showered).
You’ve a wonderful way with words. Your mouth moves and forms sounds. Crickets chirp and are understood. Language is no obstacle. You speak and I understand, I understand that the tautness of your lower lip is not nervousness, but consideration. It is a lovely tension; there are gaps between people, but know that you need only express yourself and I’d understand. “There is no sexual relation,” but there is a bridge: men and women can be friends; they can be chirping crickets.
There is a shadow when I speak these words. Its maw stretches, jaw distended, white fangs bared over a continent—then further, the sallow black of its neck, guided by eyes veined and humongous with ocean irises deepened by thalassic colours and specks of coral, stretches; the mouth splays and every man, woman, child comes under its terrible shade, a cavern life deprived of the light of my sweet words. If I choose you to receive my sweet words then, in that moment, I have chosen no other; where I shine the light of my love all others are swathed in silent sable, and I have but one mouth. “That is the point,” some would say, “that is the value of a compliment.” They would say that “like luteinized leaves in autumn, there is life in little deaths: the pain of non-acknowledgement is fertility, it is life creating and man need not fear the dark. Man need not subsist on words.”
And I think I disagree. Read: here and now, read: when I compliment you I compliment the whole of the world. What I say to you I say to every doddering grandfather, sighing grandmother, trying queer, crying baby, child in a classroom whose brows are knit in consternation, young mother, old mother, man who hates, man whose skin crawls when he sees love: what I say to you I say to all. There is no room for exception—my philosophy is absolute.
It is as absolute as you are, absolute and so wonderful. When a cat leaps onto a chair and licks its bottom, people cheer—“yes!” they clamour, “you’ve really done it!” and as the cat lives according to an invisible but eminently knowable code the people offer their praise in wool-swaddled words spoken two octaves higher than their natural pitch. “Yes!” they say, “you’re really sleeping now!” And the cat sleeps, a little darling circle. You, my darling, could be or do anything; I will cheer as you lay your head; as you struggle to hold a pencil upright and try to focus on the blank page; as you turn red at a half-false memory of embarrassment, a trifle only known by you and therefore special and significant; as you eat the same breakfast, again again again; as you arrive at the cafe, its walls a powder blue and its patrons stranded behind silver-slick Jetsonian laptops, and order the same hot drink—cause for regret with the rise of your heartbeat and the churn of your stomach; as you trace smiles, impossibly wide smiles, on frosted glass; as you leap for joy and, landing, shift your body away a half step, head cast down, embarrassed of your all too human momentary life come gushing out in response to a trivial bit of news, or perhaps this joy follows an exceptional movie or a wonderful, nigh hysterical game with friends, but in any case it is too much electric joy and, with a note of shame, it is hidden behind an unconvincingly wry smirk; as you lay your head, and breathe, and the air fills your belly and you expand—relaxing into yourself, your place assured by that breathing: then and all I will cheer, I will love you furiously and dotingly.
(And remember my love for you now is for the whole moving Earth)
You’ve a wonderful bearing. You are an unchanging statue—your nose is not eagle-edged nor imperial, yet still is painted stone: and paint may flake and fade to colours unremembered, and it will disappear. The colours are already changing (is that grey in your hair?). Your hand is just so, your foot just so—the right splayed a degree wider than the left, a suggestion of the gaucho—your face toward mine: you looking, and there eternal. The statue will remain, for all time it must be so. Even when you were so young and so different, when you were still a boy and yet did not know yourself or who or how you could be, it was the same statue, the same limbs near vitriated in marble perfection that fit gloved within your small hands and feet. You never saw the perfection in the mirror, ever so imminent in my loving gaze.
You will never change.
You will never change.
I will always love you. Look—hold my hands (we are both warm animals)—I will always love you.