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What is the difference between beautiful girls and ordinary ones? My face was symmetrical. I’d taken Accutane. I wore the right things. None of it made a difference next to Tarryn. She had a shimmer about her, a light that I could never fully understand. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her. It was like staring at the headlights of a car on a dark road. Later, in my sorority, and even later at my job, I’d meet other women like her and wonder how they were made.
 

Our culture is based in the profundity things carry. We’re always trying to see the world the way our ancestors did—we feel less of a relationship to the natural world. There was a time when we dictated our beliefs and told ourselves what was real, or what was wrong or right. There weren’t any abstractions. We knew that our language came before the world.

In 1959, Prentice Ross astounded his parents by enrolling in aviation school instead of going to Yale. Of course, being generous and humane people, Prentice’s parents didn’t have anything against pilots per se. It just happened that they had never met one, nor had they ever even thought of how a person became one. In fact, they knew not a single person who drove any machine at all (for a living, that is), so they were at a loss when they tried to imagine what their son’s future would be like.

Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.

On the way home, going,

with the hill & mammoth clouds

behind me, rushing to the house

before the rain, those beautiful Pakistani girls,

their faces happy as poppies, I thought, those girls

rushing home as I was rushing home

to beat the first small pieces

of rain falling down

like nickels in departing light. There

was the laughing of the beautiful girls,

shrieking gulls, five or six of them (depending

on whether I count myself), the bright

& shining planets of their dresses

lifting, just so, in the wind. & their black hairs.

& the black sound of horses, horses

hoofing it home, the click

& clop of their patent leather hooves—Still, it touches

my ear, this sound. I touch

my heart. I can’t stop touching

my heart & saying, Today is my birthday,

you see? For the beautiful clamor of planets

dressed as girls who, running home, have heads.

Whose heads swing black night, running home

on the black feet of horses, from the rain.

Now I understand. Today is my birthday.

It is Thursday, my day. My black day.

I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…