Thinking about you

Thinking about things I have told you.

Thinking about things I have not yet told you.

Thinking about what you have said and not said to me.

Thinking about the dappled light through the tree leaves just before the summer solstice.

Jazz, sweet/soft like flotsam and jetsam in the air of my kitchen.

A skipped beat as the old speaker filled with sand from Ocean Beach, a gift from a family of yore, crackles in and out.

The sound.

The sound of heart thunder and waves crash and the fall of memory upon memory upon that same shore and others.

The scatter of leaves, maple, I think, birch, elm, through the Memorial Union terrace, fall fast fleeing into the sanctity of winter and the poems that I read in the middle row, third back, under the thin frame of Serena Pondrom pacing in front of the class reading Eliot to me.

Really.

It was always and only, just to me.

There were no others in the class, despite the seats that filled and drifted, the students that came and went, speaking not of Michelangelo or of fog like cats that wrap themselves around the eaves.

Fog.

Like San Francisco.

The mewling fog that Karl’s its way through the night and causes me to turn to the heater in the living room and make room for spoons and tea and the scattering of thoughts that drift down the hallways of time.

I filled a second blue book with everything I have since forgotten of the rose garden, the quartets, the time that was always now.

You send me a poem in another man’s voice and I am beguiled back to that space, that hallway, that classroom buried in the interior of the building that housed classical music and blues music and white men who taught me about the suffering of black men and made money on text books that we have since sold back to buy packs of Camel cigarettes and double vanilla lattes at Espresso Royale, the one on the bottom of State Street where I would loiter outside of pinball halls and skip classes and day dream.

And I state to you, in this space, so far away, yet so collapsed in.

That I knew then what I knew not now and though I could not fathom the journey, I can see all along.

All along.

That you were there in the whisper of the poems just waiting to put your hands in my hair and shudder my name in your mouth in the dark of the night while the wind whickered in and out of the fig tree under a moon sprayed with fog and the promises made to me long ago.

Just there.

At the edge of the near frozen lake.

At the beginning of my time within time.

In the footfalls down the hall at the base of the hill underneath it all.

You were there.

Just like the mermaids were.

Singing each to each.