Expertly Loved, and Beautiful

This poem by Judy Grahn exemplifies the kind of creative spirit that shuns living up to others' expectations or inside of others' frameworks without a single, crucial, individual twist: In effect, what a yawn it is to have smooth poreless skin and a hardbody that ripples but may not quiver, even when in the throes of love, or dance.

Give me the margins, every time.

In the company I keep, even in the audience for the Voodoo Sisters, what I want are people who question, who risk, and especially those who weave the inescapable threads of themselves into established, sacred forms--not those who abandon form altogether. Because really, "gothic" is such an embattled term in art to begin with, as far as the literary sense, and then when you apply it to dance, Tempest's Gothic Bellydance Resource being a stellar example of lucid writing about GBD, what we're talking about is imagery transforming an ancient movement vocabulary. Just as this poem by Judy Grahn shows how spiders, those ultimate artists of the natural world, express their love in an entirely characteristic but--for the speaker of the poem--new way.

The poem's untitled, but here it is:

The most blonde woman in the world
one day threw off her skin
her hair, threw off her hair, declaring
'Whosoever chooses to love me
chooses to love a bald woman
with bleeding pores.'
Those who came then as her lovers
were small hard-bodied spiders
with dark eyes and an excellent
knowledge of weaving.
They spun her blood into long strands,
and altogether wove millions of red
webs, webs red in the afternoon sun.
'Now', she said, 'Now I am expertly loved,
and now I am beautiful."