A Meditation On Verana
Words by Victoria Sampaio
It’s real to feel. The burn and the itch. The wave and vibration. The cool of the kiss. The scrape of the stone. The tickle of touch. The beat of that drum. The pulse on sole of left foot drawn forth by percussion, jumping to attention. Ready for a discussion, of what, who could say. There’s no shying away from the envelope of senses in this place with no trace of a wall to be found. Perched up from the ground and the glitter of sea, with paths accidental leading feet from corners who seem to rise from the ground. The stalk of a seedling with its first taste of fresh air as it becomes something more than whatever it was before. A then and a now, before and after. Within and without.
Cast your doubt by the door next to the bikini you won’t need as you plunge into pool in a suit of your skin. Verana will let you in and it won’t let you down. Emerge in a world where the trees sing a song that shifts as the sun slinks his way back around. Day after day the phones we forgot we put down are confounded by zones of time, never fully aligned. Hour up, then behind. Time casts not her spell within this maze contained by border of trees and no fence to be found. Verana is more than looking around. It demands that you feel all the words you once sealed in a box and tucked far enough back in the brain that you thought back of brain is where it remained until the moment you crashed onto stone as you wound your way down to your bed in the night. The mezcal that heated your soul but a moment ago keeping limb loose as the pull of the earth called you forth. And you picked up your body, still nude from the group interlude at the pool beneath moon that was full, the notion volunteered by your lips for whom eight women quipped yes, cheers to the group skinny dip.
Eighteen boobs in the moonlight, for once free from the weight of a world that demands that those nipples stand down. We called to attention and shed all apprehension with the clothing left strewed wherever it lay until first light of the following day. How the sky comes to play in its shift from ink of violet, velvet in a singular hue you know time will not blot away no matter how old you get. And even when we were dry we were wet. A plunge or shower overlooking the scene, where my body felt more serene than she’d been in thirty one years shuffling around the sun. It happened right here, in a vision of space made by place with columns and no walls. Verana is where I stopped feeling small. And even when I craved sleep she would lull me awake with a song that I’d heard so I knew every word even when all I wanted was to erase stories whose place had been burrowed in my soul, woven in long ago. Verana is the me I forgot that I'd want to remember to know.
