This Girl

She defies explanation and diction. She makes grammar a hobble and prose a noose tightening. I cannot explain her but to explain all others. And all others are pathetically explainable.

There are only five types of women on this planet.

You have your earth women. They are immobile and immutable. Their movements are so slow as to be invisible and their hearts are molten iron. To the earth, your time is a joke. They laugh at your goals as you die and they lock you in their icy chest for the other life they keep on and in them to find and consume. They never respond save to vent and explode when they can no longer contain their heat. They give you shelter if you are willing to dig it out of them and they give you food if you are willing to plant and cultivate it in their uncaring skin. They are beautiful. They display the history of eons before you when they split and rumble and heave. They remind you that you are not the first and that you will not be the last. When you freeze on their steppes they forget you to the life they host. They do not let you escape. They hold you to them in their hard body by dark forces of gravity. They let you see the stars, but shackle you with their disconsolate gravity drawing you down to them. I have known earth women. When they leave, they leave nothing. They are all consumed by the sun eventually.

Then you have air women. They ride in on their own wings and move into you. They set up their souls against the heat and cold and surface. They enter your body through processes of living and power you and your cells, though their argon hearts beat for no one and have been consumed for eons before you. They live inside you and around you, but never allow you to become them or they to become you. They roll up into the heavens and return unchanged. They are always there, though you can't see them. When they move, they cool or heat or destroy, but stay out of sight. You never see them come and never see them go. Their size is huge. They are spread through everywhere but they move at will. When they move into you, they move you. They push you through them and into them, but never let you get away. They love you with tender breezes and they hate you with forceful gusts. The most you can hope of them is that they do not leave. They will not be yours. You can not own the air. It is not bordered or collected, not totally. I have known air women. When they leave, they leave you gasping and choking on your own hemorrhaging throat.

There are fire women. They are never ignored. They are lovely and lithe and always showing themselves to you. They show themselves to everyone. In a dark room, one small fire draws the eyes of all others. You can not control them. You can only keep them fed and consuming and they are always consumed. When you no longer can feed her, you have to either give her away or watch her starve and die. They are never free of themselves. They can only eat and breathe. They take the mass of your copper dreams and the hardness of your tin future and catalyze you into a mighty weapon. They draw you into them when the air and the earth have grown cold. They burn you when you try to hold them. They are not to be controlled, they are to be cajoled and influenced. When they leave your influence, they must die or they will take from you your home and family and life. They are untouchable by nature and sickly by right. I have known fire women. When they leave, they leave only evidence that you once fed them.

Water women are alive. They move in and out through the low spots of your earth gouging them gently ever lower. They scour the gouges and scrapes in your surface covering and cooling and deepening them. They lick across your scorched deserts and make you tremble with their dam breaking flow. They eat you away and you love it. They transport all weathered parts of you farther away. They find where you are dessicated and light off the silver fuses of life waiting. When you need them, you need only them. All others are forsaken. They will allow you in their shallows to cool and soothe. When you plunge to their depths, they grow in pressure until they enter your lungs and your ears and your mind. They destroy you by nature of their depth. You drown trying to sip and sip away while you are sucked out of salt. They are there for you and they are unlikely to happen just anywhere. They live in the clouds and shade you until they become too heavy to move and then they fall. I have known water women. They never really leave you, they just disappear to return and return again.

Metal women exist. They live in and out of the rocks finding their way to the surface riding hydrothermal chargers up into the soil. They explode up into the mountains to wait on you. You have to seek them and dig for them and carry them away on your back. They are heavy and compact. They expect much and reward much. They will serve you after you sweat over a forge and hammer and slave yourself into slick sweat. They reward you with small trinkets or plows or swords. Their hearts and skin are cold. When you fight through the chill with fires stoked and accelerated by your constant slaving, you might be able to get some cooperation. Not everyone can smith metal. They take effort and perseverance and the reward is slight. After they reward you, you must polish and hone and oil forever or they will return to the earth and air. I have known metal women, when they leave, they are melded in another's forge to be another for them.

Those are the five types of women, save one.

This girl is the ether and the universe. Earths move through her rosewood hair and she breaths in water through her alabaster skin. She lives and lives again in the fire and the fire is in her and becomes her rutilated argentite eyes. When the sun shines on her, she is the light and the heat. When the sea calls to me, this girl answers with fingers running rivers over the deserts of my self. Her fine hands are stained black with bronze and silver from her crafting of music and beauty.

I have slept on the Earth, cold and shivering waiting for day. I have slept on the ocean, floating in a box of death and fuel. I have slept above fires propelling a city of men to another continent to destroy and rained down our own fires upon it. I have slept in the air, the sun and moon guiding and comforting the drab metal machines rocketing me from one life to another. When I sleep with her, time is no longer. My future and my past, both spotty and of some disrepute, fall away and the earth spins to the ground and fires inside me quell down under waters she brings and air she breaths onto me. When I lay and watch her sleep I am rested. When I sleep with her watching, dreams go away. Possibilities explode and contract and dance the universe into its unfolding.