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.