Cold

I wish you could slip into me in a slide, an envelopment of limbs and body heat...

I wish the cold outside was warmed like a tea in a kettle...a gradual churn, a bubbling of steam and a comfort of closeness.

Winter is such a bitch outside.

We collided in a winter and felt such early exposure to the sweet insides of each other.

Now, far.

There is no lessening in the degrees of heat, but rather distance.

In the cold car seat of leather, with breath still a plume that exists in an exhale...the moment of ignition and driving on a solitary black road...waiting for the car to warm up.

Will it ever get as hot as the feel of you against me.

Will it ever drink in the warmth as a small sip that ruptured and spilled?

Will the hug ever reveal way more than it shows? An intimacy that only you and I know.

It is cold where you are.

I push warming thoughts to you and explain in your absence that if I were there you would be warm.

A nail, a porch and a wooden heart

In some spring season long ago there had been a decision to extend a wooden porch into the back yard off the rear door of the house.  It was the part of the house that overlooked the James River, the part of the house that caught a side glimpse of the west and sunsets.  It would have the cross breeze and it would be in shade after the height of noon.

Men in overalls and pickups showed up and there was measuring and taping, tapping of nails into wood.  The bones of the porch were evident and linear, forming against the backdrop of uneven trees and after the first couple of days it was finished, a new level extending from the house.  A graceful transition from the inside to the outside and it was where she remembered many afternoons playing, drinking lemonade and eating after a barbecue.

It was where she emerged the one time he had driven down and had informed her he was near and if he could stop by.  For a moment.  That's the word he had chosen.  A moment, because there is no defined time like a minute or an hour.  A moment could be both of those, depending on her.

So as he pulled into the grassy drive in the still-warm afternoon of fall she slid open the screen and exited onto the porch, where she stayed, clutching the handrail as if to steady her.

She was a little surprised to see him, not unpleasant just unremarked.  Her voice had been flat and slow, like she was deliberately crafting safe sentences to share with him.  He stood below her on the grass and she stood over him, two downward steps separating them.

She was wearing jeans and was barefoot, a long sleeve white tee shirt clinging to her.  Her hair was pulled up behind her and framed her angles.  Looking up at her he could detect the slight lavender scent...

Where the porch met the pilings that supported it against the flat ground there were a couple of rusted nails that hadn't been driven in flush to the wood...perhaps they had hit a knot and buckled, the hammer merely allowing them to be hammered down against the wood as crooked reminders.

Their conversation waned and the silence portions grew a bit longer...she was shuffling her feet against the wooden porch like she wanted to hasten this...either go back inside or just finish the talk.

He wanted to remain there as long as possible, just watching her.  But that was unlikely...he wanted her to drive long nails into his feet, to hold him in place and watch her for as long as he could...he wanted her to hammer long nails into his hand as he held onto the railing so he could stay perched and see her come and go.  Neither of those would happen.

So he nodded at her and attempted a slight smile and made a wave with his hand.  She nodded back, her movement in a straight line...not like his walk back to his car as he meandered around the house, his mind full of crooked reminders as he tried to find purchase and drive thoughts of her away...thoughts that just bent and turned and fell beneath his mind like poorly driven nails.

Awoke

Dark, dark, dark brilliantly dark...

Eyes that awaken me from a gray/blue slumber...a slant of a sun slicing into a morning, cutting hypotenuse lines against the white sheets and linens.

I remember your eyes above me, a cascade of your hair in a corona against your face.  You smirked, regarding me...

Dark, dark, illuminating dark...the color of your hair in a shower, brilliant brunette.  Tendrils of curls that darken with dampness and lay on your pale shoulders...the rhythm of the rain of the shower head cascading and you looking at me with make-up smeared eyes.

I remember your favorite coffee combination...not complicated but exact.  I remember ordering it, like completing a riddle, and waiting and when placed in your hands you absorbed and enjoyed.  Your dark eyes hovering above a rim of a cup, and sipping silently.

And then a walk into a rain, a grey and sullen morning...and the atmosphere was tragic and the people beside were lonely, but we walked along each other and the cold gathered and kept itself icy and we came to a point where we parted and you pulled into me and you placed pliant lips and you had a taste of chocolate and coffee and candy and you and I placed a hand on your back and held you longer than the kiss.

Dark, dark...the taste of your kiss was a recipe of a dish I had never known but had become instantly addicted.  It was a taste of a brain clamoring for more and confusing the very brief moment for something that was lasting.

I drove away in a rain, the thudding of windshield wipers as a cadence of rhythm.  It was not the same as the shower but it was similar...so it was a reminder.

Later...

Bourbon, and the taste of it.
The course of it through the parts of me that are now in an evening...the day parts long gone.
I sit in the browning of the day, the leaves falling in an afternoon.  The day is no longer golden but it is darkening.

It is a brown that is actually a slight shade of gold  A slight shade of silver.  It is a jewel.  And it is the color of your eyes that greet me and course through me and I am now awake.

Awoke.

Ice forming on edges

Sometimes the banks of the James River were silver, and sometimes they were brown...it depended on the light and the time of the day.

Sometimes they were white, if enough snow had fallen and if the air had cooled enough to keep the ice and the snow slightly melted together and reformed throughout the day.

He had kissed her goodbye lightly...on the porch while the others were inside and warm.  The afternoon was a cold humidity, slight pebbles of mist and the sun was like an erased mark smudged against the sky.  There would be no sunsets...just a gray and then a black.

Her lips crumpled gently under his, like the weight giving in to pressure...they were warm.  But they didn't separate, didn't invite any invasion to explore or to relinquish.  Rather, they formed and met his and then returned to their prior state.  He had felt this before.

It was like kissing a smile, but not a laugh.

Definitely saying a goodbye, versus a welcome.

But it was all he had, and for the brief cold moments in the day it was all he needed.

Her barely there.

Not a collapse against him, not a pull of his head towards hers...rather it was just a sweet isolated moment.  Not a collision...but rather when a boat sidles up to a dock and barely nudges the pilings, a glancing blow.

Despite the fact that the pilings are designed to hold the boat, protect it from drifting away in a storm, drifting away in a tide.

He wasn't sure if he was the boat or if he was the piling...but either way it was a glance against each other.

The James River looked silver then...her eyes were darker than a brown he had known and her hands were cold.

Inside of him there was a color of red and orange from a fire that burnt scaldingly...regardless of her tight-lipped kiss.

As he walked away he tried inhaling the cold air...trying to lower the temperature of the insides of him as quickly as he could walk away.

Soundtrack

I wish I could wake to you...

the sudden hitch in your slumber, your breathing and your slow turn to me as you awaken and orient.

But you do it anyways, just through a song in my head...a slow beating tempo...a casual awakening.  No words, it's too early...just a bit of a drumbeat that lets me warm to the idea of flinging off sheets and facing a cold floor.

In the shower it is seductive, the morning still so raw in our eyes and our throats...the idea of a slick-wet you against me in a rain from a shower-head is invigorating...a hastening of the morning with a window that is blackened but growing orange minute by minute.  I scrub the soap against me...I remember how you cleanse me, making me simply cleaner by leaning alongside me.  I remember the soap smell of you.

In a car, in red taillights and cold outdoors I hear a different sound...moving, movement. I feel the gradual wakening, the wait of coffee...the lure of energy about to start the day.  A calendar filled with everybody but you...I see the glimpse of you like light under a door.  But I strive...I strive to feel you color my day....to take note and make an exception.

At work...the tsunami of calls and others.  The masters...the bosses.  I forget to think about you...but then something happens...a moment that is gorgeous as a sun blisters against a building and a view comes to mind and I am a bit alone but I wish somebody could share it with me.

Then.

Yeah.

You are missed then.  You are an echo.

And then a ride home...a traffic blanket.  Cloying and annoying.  Edgy.  Another day when your voice is absence and I stride on.

I would have a million thoughts of you but I don't hear it exactly.  Rather it's memorized.

It's like if you recorded yourself being polite to people and put it in a recording.  And somebody made a record of it.

l would buy that album and rip off the plastic and sit in a room and listen to it for hours.

I would smile as I nodded my head.

And maybe that evening...most likely every evening....I would replay it again and again.

Bed Sheets

Sunday mornings...

Lounge with me...luxuriate.

Let me bring you splits of champagne that explode with a pop that wrecks the quiet color of the morning...

Let me push your sleep hair from your eyes, kiss a forehead and pile pillows behind you to get comfortable...

Let the talk be low...lazy.

Let me find socks to place on your feet.

Let there be no television, but rather songs played quietly in the background, an almost-white noise to just barely disrupt the silence.

There will be not talk of futures...no discussion of pasts.

Rather, it is just a conversation of the now.  What we are thinking in this quiet moment.

Outside the light is warming, the window filling with yellows and a bit of gold.  Almost the color of the champagne.

Inside you blink and regard me...and it is a favorite sight of mine.

After Dinner

Dirty...that's what he felt.  Unwashed. Unclean.

Before him, in a window over the sink, the view was towards the East, over the James River and its outlets to the Atlantic so the reflection was of the west, now pink and orange in a cold haze of an evening.

The dishes were stacked in lumps of circles, pots and pans discolored with the burnt renderings of a dinner.  It had been an amazing meal, served with decades of recipes, murmurings and suggestions of a spice here and there.  Fingers tucked into servings to offer a small taste.  Heads nodding in agreement.

Somewhere behind him was a slight murmur of argument or disagreement.  It was always like this when the liquor kicked in.

He was in the small side of the kitchen, the sound of faucets roiling as white noise.  He imagined it was like the churn of ferry engines across the James.  They just carried people...they didn't get involved.

He pushed hard scrapers against something baked on a cast iron skillet, keeping sure he didn't clean it with soap, an unforgivable sin with such southerners.  Meanwhile his fingers grew white from the soap and water.

Every so often he thought he heard her voice.  Her laugh.  It was picturesque.  It was a fingerprint.  He would recognize it for the rest of his life.  It was embedded upon him like a name.  She wouldn't fully appreciate it, but for him, scrubbing dishes in an evening it was perfectly fine.  It was what she did.  She interrupted.

A tiny tinny radio played...beach music, the type of southern music that allowed dancing and knees bouncing.  Weird that it was so late into November but that was this part of Virginia.  Southern, farm-raised, James-river echoes and frost in the mornings.  Sometimes sunrise was a perfect circle...but for tonight it was a long time coming.  Rather, in this small kitchen he only heard her voice in a room of others. Relatives, strangers, family...but as much as he was common she was exceedingly uncommon.  She never felt like that, but he knew.  And with every brush of his sponge across some dirty plate he tried to come up with words that revealed how truly uncommon she truly was.

He was left alone in cold suds that he would disrupt with hot splashes from the spigot.  That was his world...cold water, dirty from nights before...she was a hot disruption.

He thought he heard her voice coming closer...he tensed a bit...the way he always did in her proximity.  Closeness to her was was one of his favorite sensations...like the way you felt a lightning strike.  The way a magnet chooses its attraction.  The way you feel when a certain song plays.

It lands in your chest and plummets through floors...pulling wood and splinters with it.  And the bright sweet feeling that plumes.  When she was near...sometimes quiet...sometimes talking.  Either way it was kept inside of him like a window...opening and closing randomly.  Her reflection against it.  Her presence beside.

He splashed soap against a rather stubborn pan.  He exerted effort to get some stubborn stain.

When it cleared he raised up the dish and wiped it clean with a drying rag.  It was pristine.

Like her...rubbing against him to remove his stains, remove the dirt...the debris.  The parts of him that were unclean.

He watched the colors transition into an evening, the radio playing dance music and the laughter spilling from the larger part of the house.

His hands were warm, the towels a wet-warm in his hands, the stack of dishes and plates and pans miraculously clean beside him, awaiting their next role in the day.

He turned, to go back in...ready to be whatever she wanted him to be...cleaned, ready and perhaps hoping that she would pick him up and use him.

Autumn

The world is a convertible…best lived in the open air, the fresh cut wind tinged with the scent of firewood ablaze in an afternoon…

Summer slides over to let her sister, Autumn, slide past her in the seat beside.

The afternoons tilt earlier.  An apple falls.  Suntans fade.

The radio plays a song that conjures up a memory like dust being blown off of fine china.  Crisp and white, fine-bone…and in that arc of minutes as the song plays it feels like somebody just tossed those dish-plates off of a front porch to splinter and crash onto a driveway no longer heated by a summer sun.

Autumn is the color of a pumpkins eyes lit behind by a candle.  Her sister, Summer is blonde.  Autumn…well Autumn is Auburn.  Hair flecked with hints of colored leaves and earthen tones. She is blindingly more beautiful, her dirt-colored eyes reminders of how she buries the summer seeds and simply waits for Spring.  She lets you feel an afternoon warmth but cools you in the evening blues.  Overnight she taints you with a glaze of frost…perhaps to remind you of her aloofness.  Untamed.  Mercurial.  In a season of vines and stalks dying Autumn is a gatherer…pulling you deep into the ground. 

We scurry to find our hearts like kids in masks scurry for candy.

We feel the break of leaves under our feet.  We fan fires, hoping embers can reignite and bring some warmth to a suddenly cool room.

We find fault in Autumn as we reminisce of summer…we remember beaches and turquoise waters and now we only see the oranges and rubies, the scarlets and the salmons.  The colors are so glaringly close to each other these become shades of each other. 

There was a point where we were so close that we were blended colors of each other.

In winter there is only blacks and whites.  Autumn melds us…molts us.  We blend.

We blend like a leaf falls a thousand feet to join others, to nestle amongst the grounds and slumber peacefully.

The world is a convertible…we breathe in the changes in the season.  We cling to an outdoors to remember last season.

You were my calendar…my work week, my day to day.  You were my calibration, the expectation of a sunrise and a sunset.  The minutes, the slight nuanced changes of the day due to the season.

You were the colors.  You were the high foliage blooming beautiful.  You erased the humid summer.  You smelled like home.

Each year….goddamned each year I looked forward to the season of you.  The change, the aging, the gradually getting more beautiful…impossibly beautiful in the age of a year.

Autumn is a reminder of some things that are dying, and some things that are returning…if we only have such daunting patience. 

And there is the sensation that I am but one of those leaves…a bit discarded, set aside.  I tumble…I crumble beneath a footstep.

But perhaps in those brief turning moments I am attached to something more beautiful than I could ever be by myself.

The world is a convertible…breathe it in as you speed by.  It has its scents.  Particularly after summer.

Sparklers

From the moment it was lit in your hand, that brief sizzle and the convulsion of stunningly bright shards of fire made you feel magical, made you like some ancient conjurer of fire.  You held fire literally in your hands, waving it around, running with it streaming sparks behind you.

Sparklers barely left any smoke behind, they curled and blackened and collapsed in an ashen heap.  Easy to discard.

But god during those seconds when they hurtled bits of gold into the night, starting with the same amount of energy until they were finally silent, they became the official symbol of summer.  Anybody could hold one, mostly the smaller kids, but sparklers were silent and made no loud noises...they were perfectly quiet and explosive.

In a darkened lawn in an evening beneath barely visible planets and stars, the sparklers leapt and startled in the darkness like meteor showers, briefly shedding sparks and laughter across the grass.  Shining brighter than the fireflies in the trees behind them.

The problem with sparklers is they burnt too bright, too hot for too brief of a time.  They appeared in such dizzying light then disappeared.  The night became immensely darker when the sparkler fizzled out.  Almost disorienting, being guided by the light of the sparks and then absence.  No light.

I think sometimes that you were there, in my hand, emanating such brilliance and heat...cascading light upon me, a bit of flame slowly creeping towards me.

In your absence I feel a bit alone in the darkened grass, my eyes temporarily blinded and now blinking back the blackness.

It is soon to be July 4th.  I think I will think upon your gaze and the explosive resonance that it reflects upon me.

Naming Colors

Can you imagine coming up with the process of naming colors?

It was posed as a question, a straightforward one that on some level didn't do enough justice to how one came to describe something that had to be seen...versus felt...or tasted.  It's the one sense left open to interpretation and nuance.  Well maybe the sense of hearing...

It's like describing her to somebody else.

There is no way to do it justice...try to describe blue to somebody.  Half of the time it's going to be the color of the sky.  For me it would be the color of the Pacific Ocean.  To others it will be Tiffany...or the color of a bruise.  And each would be correct, each one exactly one hundred percent on target.  And each one different from each other.

So to describe her would be like describing a color...limiting it to pre-designed tints and textures...no real adequate way to uniquely describe her without falling way short in the desire to fully convey the exquisiteness of her.

The delicateness.

Feather-weight against him with the intoxicating scent of her...eyes brimming with leverage over him...knowing smiles on her barely lipsticked lips...

The fine down of hairs on the small of her back, invisible until you are right up against them.

Every day...every day he would walk outside, climb into a car and drive out into traffic, past trees and parks and the colored sky that most days would be blue.  He went out in a world surrounded by billions of colors...each one of them reminding him of her.

Summer

Somewhere a dog was barking.
Not an alarmed bark, just conversational...a few notes in the quiet late morning that barely disturbed the air.

They were high up in the barn, where the hay was usually stored but it was empty now, the space wooden and slotted, the air dry and a few strands of loose hay strewn on the floor.  They sat cross-legged facing each other, their bare knees touching.  They were sharing a popsicle, cherry red, and in the hot air it was slowly melting down her hand.  She would take a lick and then hold it out for him.  They were 14 years old, mouths a dark shade of color from the ice and when he leaned forward he went right by her hand holding the popsicle and kissed her on her mouth.

It was their first kiss.

She tasted like the sweet fruit of the ice, a candy-like moment, her mouth a little cold from the popsicle but in the heat of the hay-bin with summer starting to rise in the morning outside of them she tasted like he had always assumed she would.

New.  Fresh, foreign.  It stayed with him...long after...way long after.

He saw her now and again....a wave from a car window...a nod in church.  But like most things young and fresh and green there are movements sideways, new things to go see...the horizon of a 14 year old is a few streets, nothing like that of a 21 year old.

Later in that first-kiss summer they found ways to find each other...moments of intersection.  He would be mowing the lawn and she would appear with a glass of tea...an iced-laden glass condensing on the outside and frigid to his throat.  He would be there standing, shirtless, bits of blades of cut grass clinging to his skinny frame, his shins green.  She would smile and in the heat of the afternoon she felt like a quick burn on his skin.  She had a knowing smile...she knew she pleased him.  He drank the glass empty, returning it and briefly glancing fingers.  She walked boldly away.  He kept on with the lawn.

Or an evening when the fireflies were in full bloom...he was walking by her house and heard her laugh...knew it like you know your own voice.  Like when you hear the first few notes of a song and immediately recognize it.  He stopped, listening to her voice call out like a siren, her high notes of laughing and then a whisper to another girl's ear.  He had taken a few steps when he heard his name called...but not like a question or a surprise...rather like a statement.  Like she knew he would be stopping by and just said it flat and factual.  He loved the sound of his name in her voice.  Even at that young age, surrounded by the bright twinkle of golden lightning bugs, he understood attraction...he understood why the males burnt brightly in the hopes of finding a female.  He wished...he remembered thinking...he wished he could burn bright for her.  She laughed, called his name again and he laughed back and said hello...and for a moment they stayed like that...until her friend started along again and he waved his goodbye, the fresh cut lawn flickering with fireflies, the evening a bit humid but with a breeze.  He didn't know the word yet but what he felt was yearning.  He couldn't explain it and that made him unsettled...departing in the dusk and following the white sidewalk back to his home.

Years later, after he had joined the Army and she had gone to school there was a town picnic.  It was very hot and humid, and the crowd was moving slow and lazily, mixed amongst park tables and lawn chairs and blankets spread across the ground.  He had somewhere perhaps hoped that she would be there, but had no definitive expectation.  He had learned of the word yearning and while it was now just a bit of a pilot-light feeling for him, low and quiet inside of him, he knew that the sight of her would perhaps change the conflagration.

He didn't see her though.  He saw her mom, and she had fussed over him and his short hair.  He had a medal, it had been written up in the paper...but he was dressed in jeans and a black tee shirt.  She was spending the summer traveling...looking for work but mostly following a boy.  He smiled at her mom when she said that it wasn't worth the follow.

He asked her if she might be home soon...he was receiving new orders and wouldn't be around much longer.  Her mom wasn't sure.

In the walk home, where the pines were across the low flat field the first fireflies of the evening were starting to blink.  A few low, some adventuresome ones braving the higher limbs, most likely perfect for when the bats would start to appear.  The town was behind him, but the grasp of it still held him..the tiny streets and the park...the white church with its steeple and the fresh cut lawns of summer.  He heard a dog bark...not a dangerous sound but a call...perhaps wondering if another animal was out there to respond.  He felt the bit of sweat slide down his cheek and he remembered the first-kiss summer and the float of fireflies and the announcement of a dog bark, the canopy of ghost-like stars and the smoke from backyard barbecues...the passing by of slow-moving cars and laughter from porches...he breathed in the things that were still her from his past and he could easily pluck from his mind and from his yearnings his memory of the  newly discovered and never forgotten taste of her.

Scrimp

There is no picture here. There couldn't be.

The main reason is even a picture would fall woefully short of you in my eye. Dreadfully scrimping on the details of you when you frame in my iris.

I do remember sights. I remember an encounter in a supermarket with white halogen lights and bright tile, a cart filled with boxes and wines. The color of spices on the shelves.

But you. You were delightful. You barely cracked a smile as the surprise of our encounter registered on your brain.

But that was then.

Now I get to see you again. Albeit briefly.

And you forgot that I love the whole of you that you may have forgotten.
You do not see what I have grown to expect. The familiar. The comforting. The exquisite unique but always the same face and body.

Ageless. Unrelenting.

I could see a million sunsets and still be drawn to the beach.

You are my horizon. The edge on me. From where I get to stand you are not a sunset because you are not a nightly scene.

But goddamn.

When I get the slight chance to spend a moment with you I am inspired. I am reminded. You are my muse. My pallet. My colors. My walk amongst a hallway of art.

You may wear yourself down in your mind. But in my world you stun. You eclipse. You echo and reverberate and consume my thoughts.

You. Your gentle movement into me.

You are so new. So familiar. I cannot scrimp on the words you compel me to describe the amazingly influential impact you bring.

I memorize you. Only to find it is more beautiful when you appear.

June

The warmth of an evening, with a slight breeze...it is a kiss to a twilight...the way the light lingers just a moment longer than before, even if just for a few minutes...the way we say goodbye, the loitering, the slight light grasp of a finger before you have to let it fall away...the taste of you still reminiscent on me in the steps as we adjourn.

June is the removal of the warm blanket, the opening of windows to the start of summer.  The chirp of the tiny frogs...the cricket violins and the weight of air after a storm...light, airy...cleansed.

June reminds me of you, the way you change in a season...the way you start to warm, the way a skin can glisten...it is not high heat, but rather the slow build of warmth.

Reconnecting...it is not violent, but rather it is familiar.  The way the floorboards on a summer porch creak and feel soft on feet after heated by the day...the way you can touch the wood and the afternoon warmth has permeated...the way I feel if I pull you close and your cheek strides against mine...like two hands but not hands but rather the curve of your cheek.

The way the sun strides across the floor with the arc of its voyage... I feel the same when moving towards you...slowly...inexorably.  My gradual movement towards you is exceptionally slow...I cannot predict its pace.

But like the warming rays as the winter turns itself to spring...and spring in Virginia is just another cousin to winter...summer is the pretty sister.  The one everyone hates, perhaps jealous.  The bee sting lips....the flip flop weekends.  It is when the day gets stretched across the sky in pinks and blues like taffy...and suddenly the night isn't quite dark but rather painted lighter.

An hour becomes extended, an evening lingers...loiters...it is like me, not wanting to say goodbye to you...cannot wait to see you again...not memorizing when that will be...but just like June hours becoming a bit longer, the desire in me increases...the sap rises, the minutes become annoying.

Any delay, to you, feels elongated.

We kissed first in February.

By June the heat had set in.

We are seasonal...and I am good with that as we head into Summer.

Knowledge

It had been an idyllic evening...polite conversation.  The slight hills near Middleburg were in full golden glow, shadows on the vineyards darkening...the day's heat had dissipated and in the blues of the shade and lengthening shadows there was a coolness.

She had invited him over, and they were on her deck, overlooking the backyard and the rear of the houses across from them.  They were looking, according to a painter he knew, at the afterglow...meaning they weren't looking at the sunset but rather at the light in the opposite direction. The fading light, thrown in the colors of the evening as it dwindled.

How well do you know me?  She had asked him as she replenished his bourbon.  He was on his second...the ice in slight shards.  A perfect immolation, like the night sky currently burning above him in its collision of dark, clouds, blue and gold.

I think I'd have to say I know 100% of you physically.  I think I would say I know 50% of you mentally.

She brought up the bottle and set it down on the table.  The smell of fresh cut grass was in the air, a slight bit of wild onion and turf.  It was the smell of summer, but it wasn't quite summer so it was reminiscent.  A reminder...like all things scented.

100%?  That's a pretty sure sample.

He took a long draw from his drink, almost to the point of downing it.  Given the sun's still present reminder he felt it was too early to absorb this much drink...so he set his glass down.

Do you want me to tell you how I know you?  Or how I recognize you?

What's the difference?  

The difference is in our absence.  The difference is I...he stopped...holding his glass on the wooden table.  It was harder to explain to her.  To her it was all about numbers and tables, spreadsheets or documents.  It was empirical.

What is the difference?  She repeated.  She was standing next to him, holding the bourbon bottle.  She was wearing jeans and a pink shirt with a white underling.  She was barefoot, and he saw her toenails painted a blush that she was partial to.  He knew her legs were shaved perfectly, that her underwear was black and that she smelled like juniper and lavender and some soap he couldn't quiet detect.  Her hair was blowing slightly, and drifted across her face and she occasionally reached up to push it away.

The difference is I know you...but as much as I know you there is still a big mystery.

A mystery?

Yeah.  Some unknowns.

Okay...so...elaborate...

In his mind he cataloged his books of her...his images, the visages, the transcripts.  The tale of the tape.  It was a worthy exercise but she probably hadn't ever known it herself...parts maybe...but not all.

Okay...when you are happy and you are pleased to hear from me you have a little hum that you add to your end of sentences...an upward sounding note that takes the last syllable and is like a sigh but it's really just an extension of the last consonant and it almost sounds like a "hmm" but it's attached to the last word.  It's very Taylor Swift like.

Silence.

What?

Go listen to a Taylor song...she ends some sentences with a throat sound that is an extension of the last word in the lyric.  You do the same.  Maybe only with me, maybe not. But I just hear it when you say it to me.  And it's almost like a laugh, a light note.  Because sometimes you'd rather just murmur or make a sound than make a word...and I'm fine with that.

I'm not sure I even realized that I did that.

You do it.

Fuck...what else do I do?

He held up his glass which had absorbed the ice.  It was lower now, the brown liquid a bit above the bottom.  He held it to her and she poured in enough to get halfway.

woah...that's good.

Just trying to get you to spill the goods.

Okay...well there's not a ton to spill...just knowledge.  You know...gained over time.

Right....okay go on.

So...your nose.

My nose?  

Your nose.  I love your nose...it's a barometer.

A what?

An indicator.

What the fuck.

It's a reveal.  I love it because when you drink it is the first part of your body that indicates that you're having a drink..it tends to get a little red...it tends to let me know that you're having a drink with me. Again, I have no idea if that happens all the time, but I do remember that I sense it.

Great...that sounds awful.

No...it's not...I love it...more importantly the beauty of your nose is that it is the first part of you to get sunburnt...it is the first part of you to freckle...your nose is a way for me to detect what you've been doing...drinking, tanning...I can be aware.

Christ...do you notice everything?

I think I tend to...but I hope that you know that it's because I think in you I have found some perfections and I have to remind myself that you are not always near me....and I have to find something human.

Something human?

Something not perfect...but as gorgeous as I would want to find it.

So a flaw?

Hardly.

Then what would you call it?

He took a sip and let the bourbon warm him even more. The evening was purple, a bit of activity with the fireflies but nothing major.  She radiated warmth...her presence beside him was the moon against an evening...soothing and familiar.

I would call it knowledge...I would call it seeing you without make up...seeing you emerge from a shower, hair curly and unkempt...I would call it the way your breath tastes in the morning with a first kiss, the way you taste after a glass of wine...I would call it the way you smell after a workday and we meet for a drink and I hug you and you smell amazing...I would call it the way you can grip me, take hold of me in a way that you know is perfect...the way you lay your hands on me, the way you can kiss me with your eyes closed...the way you can let me play with your hair and let you relax...the way you sound when you release and the way you purr when you are most at your leisure with me...that's what I would call it. There's no single word...but knowledge feels like the best answer.

The crickets were emerging and the purple shadows were taking over slowly...he reached over a put some ice cubes in his drink and for a few moments the only sounds were the tinkling of it melting.

It's a good answer she finally admitted.

The Shape of You...

I'm not a big fan of the Ed Sheeran song...but I find his premise appealing.

In love with the shape of you.

It's the instantaneous recognition...the darkened room silhouette.  The familiar.

It is far from routine...rather, it is quite the opposite.  If I had even the luxury of daily...weekly...monthly views, I'd perhaps feel spoiled, feel that I didn't deserve.

Most likely I don't.

I must have failed in projecting what the image means when it is near me, when it closes, when it gathers.  When you are in the same proximity, I must have failed to tell you of the eclipse of all other things...all others.

High beam like in a posture that makes me slightly blink but not look away...you capture.

Mesmerize.  Compel.  And it is in the recognizable outline of you...especially approaching.

Because the same outline departing is exquisitely sad.  Suffocating.  Extinguishing.

You blot the sun.

You blind me in one eye.

The outline of you must be the same feeling explorers felt, adrift at sea for days, months and even years, staring at the blue slate horizon unbroken by land or by shape, high up in a crow's nest and following the sun again and again...the complete unbroken routine of an ocean with no end in sight....moving slowly, steadily, but routinely mind-numbingly consistent.

My days...

And then, with the sweet outburst from a lookout, a slight irregular shape on the far horizon.  Something breaking apart the horizon.

The potential...the untapped.  The different.

The same emotion when I see the shape of you fix in my frame and approach me.

Age

The toast of the town. 

I love coming back to this city. I love coming back in time. I realize that the love I feel for this city is a love over time. Love over time conquers. It creates a mesh of memories. It thickens and binds. 

This city is an old love. It has history. Heartbreak. It reminds me. 

But it doesn't age me. Rather, after a birthday weekend it reminds me to raise a toast to love over time. Love over decades. Expanses. 

Returning to New York is a homecoming. It returns me to a time when I am ageless. 

That is what defines such an exquisite relation. 

And so deserving of this raised glass 

Editor's Note

Dear reader, I did not suddenly  sit down and pound out a bunch of new pieces.

Rather, I just tied off some drafts that I felt I could release...I quite often try to force myself to contribute something frequently...but in the middle of it I sometimes lose my mojo.   It's not an excuse...I just feel it's not quite ready.

Most of the time I do it all in one sitting, and just let the flow take the words and craft whatever I'm thinking...to me it is like jazz....freedom and one-time notes that cannot be captured or put back for editing.

It's probably the single biggest reason why I will never make it as a writer...I hate to change the things that I initially create and do not want them to be altered.

Align

She was laying alongside him, her head just along his breastbone, and her hair was spilling upon him.  He was holding bits and pieces of it in his hands, splayed between his fingers, moving from the top of her head down to her shoulders.  He could see the white scalp, the shades of hair color starting and then moving in colors away from the part-line.

Every now and then he would open his palm and slide it down the length of her hair, like he was smoothing out the ends. Sometimes he just rested his hand slightly behind her ear, and let his fingers trace the hairline from their until it disappeared into the tapering behind her neck.

His chest moved slightly, because she was extremely light against him, and she molded onto him like she was pressed from an iron, warming, clinging, but slowly and gradually.  Melting.  Butter into the crevices of hot corn on the cob.  Rivulets of waffle-mix spilling and bubbling into the streets of the griddle.  When she was against him, in these quiet and effortless moments, he often felt like they shared each other...like a part of him was strung into her, and he needed to feel her breathe for him to breathe...that he needed to watch her pulse beat sweetly in her neck for him to metronome his own heart.

She breathed in, he breathed out.

What are you doing up there?  She murmured against the tee shirt of his chest, and she said it like she had suddenly awakened.  He had never been the first voice she had spoken to in a morning, but he had always known how it might sound.  Or at least he had hoped.

I'm admiring your scalp.

She tilted her head upwards, and he saw down her forehead, the angle of her nose, the rise of the cheekbones seen from above.


I'm pretty sure it's like all the others you've seen.

You'd be wrong.

Why?  Have I got something in my hair?

No...no.  You've got beautiful hair.  Nothing to worry about.  All good from up here.

She moved her head so it went back down, he couldn't tell if she was looking at something or had her eyes closed.


I was just finding a part of you that I had never really noticed he offered up.

You're taller than me...you get lots of time to study my hairline.

One would think...but it's where the scent of shampoo lingers the most, where the conditioners moisten and...condition, I suppose.

They're doing their job...this feels like an inspection.

He stopped.  Hardly.  I'd call it admiring.  I always love the different parts of you that make up the whole...but I will stop for now.

Thank you.

He didn't tell her that he did it to remind him that she was real, that she was there...that she had skin that could be cut, that she could bleed, that she wasn't just this part of his imagination but rather delicate and glaringly real.

A Storm to Wake to

It was well after midnight, well past the point that they had ascended upstairs, and intertwined themselves on the double bed.  They slept back to back, an indicator of the mood, as some reluctance had gently undone some things...he imagined ribbons of two different colors that had been tightly tied.  Now they were dangling, just barely touching each other.

Her house in Wakefield faced north, so that the slow arc of the sun traced itself from right to left across her yard.  The prevailing winds usually came in the opposite direction, westward...so it was usually a surprise to be immersed in a storm...you couldn't watch it come in like a distant ship that starts like that dot on the horizon.

So as he had listened to her breathing become a rhythm, his awareness of her nearby and being asleep, he was almost there when the slight rumble came from outside.  Hesitant to jostle the bed he slowly turned and soon he was flat on his back, watching the ceiling, waiting for the storm to arrive.

It wasn't too long.

He counted the beats between the flashes and the thunder and could tell it was moving quickly towards them.  She was still asleep as he glanced over and saw her shoulders rising slightly with her sleep breathing.  He wanted to say something, wanted to gently wake her...but in this peace before the evening exploded he stayed quiet...wanting her to keep these moments to her...not him.

The room suddenly lit up like a thousand floodlights flashed once and then immediately turned off, while in that blinding blink a bomb went off in the boom of a thunder cracking the evening in two.  He felt her body jump slightly and she let out a small almost child-like noise.  It had scared her.

He flipped to his right and put his arm around her.

She didn't resist.

For the next 20 minutes he held her, and when the blinking whites from the weather finally stopped she was back asleep against him.

Finally he reluctantly went to sleep...trying to dream exactly what he was doing with her right then and there.