Nascent Dream of a Muse
by Melissa Coffey
Suspended, amongst this web of winding grey veins — breathing somehow — misted air infused through marble pores. Not yet nascent, the suggestion of me lies curled like a question mark at this stone’s heart. Crescented in on the dream of genesis, like any fragile, unborn thing. Expectant without the knowledge of wanting. Fecund with possibilities.
Listen. With unformed ears, instincts blind; a gentle knocking. Some spirit asking to be let in. Not yet cognisant of an I— but some future yearning of anima still twitches and trembles, answering the call of that insistent, incessant percussion beyond. Listen. Vibrations through my protective cocoon. Tap-tap at the portal of my gauzy soul.
The sounds beyond my skeletal senses suggest a world awaits— could there be such a thing — outside this implacable vessel. I am yet but the dreamed desires of my maker. Muse in potentia. He, my raison d’etre.
Stone, remembering it was once shifting sands, yields to my slow unfurling.
No sense of time passing — only that the Other, outside, moves ever closer. His conjuring instrument strikes out the story that shapes my becoming, its rhythms, encoding my heartbeat. Reverberations, resounding me devoutly into form. I begin to long for those persistent knocks, to hunger for them. They translate into pulses that quicken my blood, in defiance of these marbled veins.
Once intangible, I feel the outlines of a body, straining against this stone. My birth chamber, a heavy husk I’m now impatient to burst from, to emerge into an unknown world beyond this hazy dusk that wraps around me. I ache for it, like an impossible vision, but know not what to call it.
Awakening from slumber and dreams of my creator, I stretch forth my senses—and feel it, know its name. Light, delicate as a dawning day, eking through this now-fragile stone cowl about me; whittled down, eggshell-thin.
I hear his instruments chisel and scrape. I sense him circling me, summoning me, bidding me break free. And suddenly, I feel the light upon my body.
Light, in golden hues, touches the top of my head, a balm of benediction. Light bathes the pallor of my shoulders in gilded tones; light, flooding over my form, a gown of fiery muslin.
Finally I hear his voice, coaxing me into consciousness, endearments imbuing my still-clumsy surfaces with virgin blushes. I feel his hands grazing along my spine, then his arms about my waist to steady me. Feel the warmth of his fingers, brushing my cheek with tender ministrations of a craftsman. Of a lover.
Oh heated touch, such sweet igniting of one who has known only stone’s cold embrace. Eagerly, I turn in his arms, leaning down to let him kiss me.
I wake. I am. Alive to his gaze.
Pygmalion tells me the light I felt was the presence of Venus, summoning life into my body. I know nothing of goddesses. But I know I was always waiting; waiting to be called into existence by the one who loved me, loves me still. By the one I know will love me always.
It is my third day in this body, in this life. Strange to think I have not yet been in this world as many days as I have fingers on one hand. Yet I feel I’ve known the man lying beside me forever.
I let my eyes linger on the length of his body, the generous cove of his chest where my head beaches itself in sleep, the lean lines of muscle along his torso, the slender shadows running down from his hips to the place the bedclothes conceal. A body, similar, and yet so different to mine. If I were a sculptor, I would not shape him any other way.
I gaze into the world of his face, wondering how those eyes, hidden beneath closed lids envisaged me, created me from a coarse lump of marble.
He wakes and calls me Galatea. He tells me, as he places kisses on the inside of my wrists, the crook of my elbow, on the creamy crescents of my breasts until I swoon with pleasure, that my skin glows like moonlight; he tells me my name means “she who is milk-white”. So I let him drink from me, quench his thirst with my love.
After all, he is my Pygmalion. He made me from love.
How could I not love him in return?
Melissa Coffey is an Australian writer, poet and editor, residing in Melbourne. Their work is often tinged with darkness, exploring loss, desire, and the eloquence of cracks in the mind. Melissa’s poetry and fiction are published in Crow & Cross Keys, Crow’s Quill Magazine, Aurora Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Last Girls Club and Exist Otherwise. You can read Melissa’s fiction and prose poetry in two new anthologies: Anna Karenina Isn’t Dead, an anthology of feminist literary reimaginings (Improbable Press) and The Memory Palace (via The Ekphrastic Review). Melissa is working on several chapbooks and a novella. Connect on Twitter @CuriousSeeds.
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