Jazz Toni Morrison

jazz.txt

From "Jazz" by Toni Morrison

It's nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their 
ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. 
They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down 
underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls 
they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang 
on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who 
else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could 
anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would 
be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers, both of them have washed and 
hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together nevermind 
one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress curved like a 
preacher's palm asking for witnesses in His name's sake, enclosed them each and 
every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the 
covers because they don't have to look at themselves anymore; there is not 
stud's eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, 
bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they 
never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.

But there is another part, not so secret. The part that touches fingers when 
one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The part that closes her neckline 
snap while waiting for the trolley; and brushes lint from his blue serge suit 
when they come out the movie house into the sunlight.

I envy their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in 
secret and longed, aw longed to show it -- to be able to say out loud what they 
have no need to say at all: That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole 
self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show 
it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I 
like your fingers on and on lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a 
long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you 
and hearing you answer -- that's the kick.

But I can's say that aloud; I can't tell anyone that I have been waiting for 
this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were 
able I'd say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free 
to let you because look, look. Look where you hands are. Now.