He knows if he reached across the table and pulled her jaw to his, she wouldn’t resist, she would give in gladly, the jaw with that serrated scar. She said she got it when she fell off a bicycle learning to balance her weight on twin circular rims. If she could she would have preferred wings. A sparrow’s would be sufficient to lift her frame, now nearly all bone, into space. He knows so much about her without asking or being answered to. The creak of her laughter, like a safe’s tumblers falling into place to reveal lambent stones – agates, rubies, crystal. The next stone her thoughts would leap to from the one they both stood on, holding each other by the elbows.

But he doesn’t. Apart from his shyness, a promise holds him back, the iron code that he had placed around himself like a diver’s cage sinking into a spiral of sharks. Does fidelity come before love is a question he will often ask himself later? He can’t knife the mask he has donned, out of his own choice, from his skin, and he doesn’t want to kiss her with its lips of plaster, of burred wood. He knows ahead that he will regret it in the years to come, even as he might console himself for keeping his conscience clear. Then why did he come? To test himself? To hold his timorous doubts to sea air?

That he is now yoked to his own kind. That the color of hair that curtains his eyes as he makes love is that of his own, black. That she is a strange continent made up of three different countries, and as many etymologies, and epics. That her hair is not black but polished copper, a tangle of wires pulled out of their colorful plastic sheaths, conducting currents, music, thought. That he can’t look into her eyes for long because years later an archeologist would find him supine in their jade or a vintner breaking open a cask would find his brown skin scattered in their green wine.

Wind from the great lake funnels Through the alleys of this strange And brutal city, that was just released from an icy straitjacket.

You, a convict from a prison ship, Are stranded here like a sea anemone, Which will eventually become rock,

Which is chained to this heart, a dynamite cap Waiting for its fuse to be lit, to explode Your body’s caverns veined with emotion.

Footsteps follow behind you. A few paces away a body sluices through The hole you left behind in the night.

At those high windows, invisible to you Since you have been denied ascension, she stands, An insomniac, awaiting morning light, the arrival of birds, and of beloveds.

With the customary jealousy I would feel Toward the creator of some perfect thing,

I stand at the threshold of the room in Which you are bent over our little egg-

Head, (who is already full of vexing Questions – is this comeuppance for

What we, in turn, did to our parents?) Humming, as you nudge her to hold

Still, as the comb in your hand rustles Through her jet black hair (O! this I

Fell in love with first, before anything when You rose towards me from that market crowd),

And wonder about that someone, who will Descend from the hills, to bear our locus

Of sight away, and spill this dark light, which You are now methodically braiding, all over his

White bed, just as I first loosened your jasmine Scented plait, overcome with desire and love.

Notes: You gaff a sudden image, which in a conversation suddenly lights a sulfur match in the aorta, and sends a spark coursing down wintry blood. Outside as thin rain drips from the eaves into pots of herbs – to grow flowers one needs a feminine presence inside one’s house or oneself – at the front door, you check for the presence of this image in the catalogue of images you loosely hold in a musty drawer standing in your back-skull.