On Her Beauty

I was awoken this morning with and by an image of her. She's standing naked in her kitchen, dizzy grin, glasses down on her nose, arms half-extended to me. in my hynopompic fantasy, i wait to take her in my arms so that i can admire her. the feeling is a bit aesthetic, a lot lusty and a bit of raw gratitude, but it's much more than that. i'm wrestling with understanding it.
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when i first met her, i responded warmly to her looks. i am not driven by looks at all and at the same time, i'm a sucker for beauty-any beauty. i remember being transfixed (pierced through, impaled) by a landscape in the veneto and losing an afternoon gaping while my wine evaporated. there was the brewhouse at budvar and the lectern at st. stephen's. and so on and on.
so i found her, sitting across a table, to be fascinating, challenging, prickly and smooth all at once. i came home from meeting her carrying a swarm of impressions and her appearance was a pleasant, if minor buzz in the cloud.

last weekend, i was swamped with her beauty. yesterday, i got a shiver. a week ago, when i was sick with loss and anger and self-contempt, i barely noticed how she looked. i may have screwed in the diffusion filter to gauze her out of my vision.

so what's up? the easy answer is that i and we admire what admires us back. our appreciation increases with our affections or our security.
but wait, butt weight, there's more: beauty itself moves background-to-foreground. last week's world was uglier. no pictures made, no quick trots into the museum. this week's world has Nymphalis aliopa
practically landing on my shoe.

let''s get all solipsistic on this. let's say that beauty is entirely an internal creation: i made my morning erotic image, i made the butterfly land and i made the ice cream taste so good. if that's true then either of two things might follow. one is that i create how i perceive the world: matisse didn't do anything, georges perrier is just another cook, and the beauty in the world is all me. 

another is that beauty-hers and the world's-exists as a co-creation of the beholder and the world and that i push it further away or closer in with my croupier's rake. maybe it's a system with each end of the rake calling the other. so, the whole and happy me moves the beauty closer and the beauty calls out and slithers the world to my attention. 

this morning, awake and tumescent, i don't really understand what's going on. her beauty persists, it follows me home and spends the night even when she doesn't.  i have a motto instead of a thought and the motto is something like:

me happy, me see pretty

i think i'll just sit with that awhile.