Nick of Time

Memory.  A decade on.

Summer felt somehow brighter, lighter.  Ignited by flowers, fireworks, the explosions of color, life on fire.  On fire with life.

There was the warm sun of our promiscuity.  The libertine hours.  The languid days.  The electric nights of Scotch and water.  The embers of endless cigarettes.  The way faces appear, vaguely, when you inhale.  An orange glow to trace your features, to suggest you to me, to draw me deeper.  Follow.

Follow the moon into morning.  The indigo of 3 AM.  The green of 4 AM, the pink of 5 AM.  Orange arrives without trumpets.  There will be no apocalypse, today.  Just the dawn and the devouring engines.  The heat of the day.

I assemble the pictures.  I guess at the people's names.  They have left me to make other lives, large lives lived large.

What has happened?  Time is a fleeting melody.  Recalled in the shower.  For no reason.  Erased by the towel that covers my face.  I lay naked on the bed thinking of nothing.  The summer air comes in the window.  A light wind.  A cautious lover.  I lay naked on the bed.  I slowly dry.  Only five notes retain.  They make no sense.  They are stripped of their context.

Like these pictures.  Like that summer.  The hum of the cicadas says nothing.  The fireflies are submerged in the blue ink of evening.  Like sparklers, they spell something when on wing.  Their mutant calligraphy will make sense, one day.  They are casting spells.  

An old friend.  More likely.  An acquaintance, tainted with a hopeless crush on me, stops me on the street.  This is not the town we lived in, then.  This is not the town I live in now.  I call this a coincidence.  His romantic mind prefers to call it serendipity.  But it is quickly clear that his life then and my life then depend on nothing shared.

At his request, we exchange phone numbers; we will never speak again.

I dare to say:  were you absolved of the expectations of others.  The connections controlled by rhythms and words, well-practiced over years, might be abandoned.  And you discover the limitations.  Yourself.  Your family.  Your spouse.  Your lover.  Your children.  A tired script of acceptable topics.  Predictable phrases.  Familiar lies. 

Take me back to summer.  The undulating forest floor.  The acid filling the pines with breath.  The lessons of your scouting days applied.  Before...

And after, just the photographs, just the names scrambled.  Just the sun.  The long arms of memory.  The long arms of summer. 

Remembering Sex

The contours of you are shrouded now, veils of vaporous silk, smoke that smells of lavender, vanilla, amber or civet. The oils evaporate on disappearing skin. They are a shimmer, a shiver, a shudder, a wake. Only pieces of you will remain: your name that sounded like a character's, your black eyes entrapping the sun, the apish hair on your forearm, the leaden weight of your cock. You are a stain on my memory, spilled wine on white alpaca.

I have laid beside a hundred (or more) lovers and--closing my eyes tightly, trying to memorize this other, concentrating--I have listened to the crackle and pop as they begin to burn. Disfigured by memory, I retain them, the ember and the heat. But they are only skeletons, bones thrown on the fire. The glowing eyes of Tituba will teach us how to read...

...our fortunes. This one is only a trickle of sweat that cuts his blade and bleeds down the valley of his spine. Another will forever be his muffled ecstasy, the pleading whisper and the arms wrapped, starving, round my neck. A third is one bright blue, bloodshot eye, comically caught in the deluge of ejaculant, the stinging of my laughter.

The last, let's say, is a gray-haired stranger; between his few and awkward words, a sadness sits in the expectant silence that almost sounds like screaming. After we have both cum, he will show me photographs. He too is trying to remember the details now forgotten, trying to be satisfied with what remains.