Alphabetarion # Cyclops | Julio Cortázar, 1963

William Baziotes, Cyclops, 1947

“I touch your mouth, with the tip of my fingers I touch the edge of your mouth, I am sketching it as if it were coming out of my drawing hand, as if your mouth opened for the first time, and all I have to do is close my eyes to undo it all and start over; every time I conjure up the mouth I desire, the mouth that my hand chooses and draws on your face, a mouth chosen among all mouths, with supreme liberty chosen by me to draw it with my hands on your face, and which by some chance I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth that smiles beneath the one my hand is drawing on you.
You look at me, up close you look at me, closer now, and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer and closer each time and our eyes grow larger, they overlap, they merge into one, and the cyclopses look at each other, breathing in confusion, the mouths meet and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, the tongues barely touching the teeth, playing in their recesses where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. And then my hands sink into your hair, slowly caress the depth of your hair while we kiss as if we had our mouths full of flowers, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet; and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible simultaneous sucking in of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one and the same saliva and one and the same taste of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.”

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, 1963