6.15.00

The first time I saw him I didn't know his song. He was only a beautiful body on his own small stage, wearing a sheer and white linen shirt over black cotton trousers. He was dancing and singing the song I wasn't hearing. His hair had grown like black ivy and sometimes the curls flew out and straightened as he turned. He would not go unheard and after awhile I couldn't not listen for he was spinning with linen clad arms outstretched by a voice sudden as the wind. The light behind him cast a lovely thin torso in the spinnaking gauze, revealing ribs and the shapes and colors of nipples. A body of enchanted spirit. He was tireless in the presence of his own soul, while I who can contain with convincing peace the vipers of my own, yielded and let my head roll back in submission. That kind of love when it begins, begins with the widest of embraces. As though in audience, the boundaries of the stage and his place on it were held respectfully; I was content to admire distantly the slope of his jaw line to a deliciously boyish bare chin, and to imagine, without coveting, the softness of that flesh between my teeth. Now, when he is not before me, his song is all that I know of him. In some ways, I guess it was a love affair that began six years ago. That moment is as much the present as it is a memory; it could have been prescience, or maybe that scene just keeps happening. Time seems to fold on itself not by the algorithms of genius, but by our own distractions into other dimensions of wish and regret. This must be how we lose touch with the actual linearity of our histories.

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