Chardonnay
…and then he moved on. He said I should drink my first glass of Chardonnay as a local Blanc de Blanc so I looked at the bottles and chose Wemmier. He said I should drink her while reading. While I read A Lover’s Discourse. I read Kristeva. While I read. He said, drinking her was the experience of the absolute feminine that has colonized the world like a literature. She is the sky and the stars and the sun in a bottle. Feminist.
Female who started the lyric, Feminist who started the novel. This is the text of her body. He said she started as the cold, remote erotic object on which desire sprung and dreams were made on. She were laced in oak forests and shrouded in a nightgown of vanilla. She became a porn star, giving herself away with buttery large breasts. She is the white wine of the sky in day. There are the universes of her hands with which she grips every cranny of the world. She is poetry; she is the lyric; she is the ode, she is the epic, he said. Woman: star above ithaca, hovering over this dark New York; woman, full of life, thin now, lean, svelte, with apple-y cheeks, sometimes with curves and full, sometime with eyelids like lemons, with nutty kooky demeanor, sometimes with clean soft skin, with silly toasted and herby. She is the North Star, the Southern Cross, that of the Absolute Feminine, the compass that guides Odysseus. Up close, invisible, from a distance she is the eternal sun. Coated in steel. Joan of Arc of the Finger Lakes. He poured me a glass of her and I hallucinated. Queen. blonde. platinum. whore and virgin. Better virgin.
With her comes the idea of femininity and sex. She is the thunder of a perfect mind. Mother, virgin, whore, saint. Burning and dying. She was ablaze on my tongue. She is a star. Hail Mary full of grace, holy mary mother of god, he recited. Woman of the good (and naughty). Mother the light. Mother the fire. Woman who fell from the sky, sky woman. Natural woman. Eternal woman. Forever and free and feminist and just. He said people think her dead but forget champagne and all that sparkles. They say anything but Chardonnay, ABC. But, nothing, he said. That is Chardonnay’s texture and grit. The bottle is a lens or paradigm with which I can see both the local and global. I hated her at first. I hated what she did to me. But oh how love the best of champagne. Later, I went to Reims on my honeymoon and my husband couldn’t get enough of her. She is his favorite feminist from the 70’s.