You are the thing,
Between
The shadow and the soul—
The slant.
The shift in the time, the traverse down the hallway.
The wood slats soft shuddering under socked feet.
Where were you when I was seventeen?
Wandering about an orchard in Wisconsin day dreaming New York in my head.
Already casting about for your magic.
(I found it once in a whirl of LSD when I was seventeen and he was Donovan and the kiss was falling into a black hole of velvet)
The supposition of being in time, the same time, the place within the slant, the whisper, the girl in the doorway between apple and end.
In your arms I am.
Everywhere.
Everything.
Every bird in the murmuration against the sunset sky, the levee, the high grass, the wild white egrets in a cluster on their own private island in a cloud cake divination of god.
You in the willow
The magic.
A solace, that sunset, atop a boat, serenaded by a child’s toy ukulele.
Smitten.
You said.
I must admit, I am smitten.
And then there were your eyes that day, that day that I shied away, skittered sideway into some domesticated scene with an old man, a cat drinking skim milk from a cracked yellow china saucer, desiccated like the soft smoky paws of Eliot’s sky above the stove pipes in London town.
Your
Eyes, soft, golden brown, glowing.
Have eyes ever glowed so at me?
I think not.
Love,
Love,
Love,
You sang out to me, my heart swelled and battered at my breast and the cold in the delta chafed my fingers and thread its way into my heart.
Knowing that I would hurt you.
I broke the magic.
I am still crying over it.
Aloft in a plane, high above the world, scattered in the clouds and pink lemonade bubble gum of my lust/love/magic/show/flash/boom/applause/carnival—
A cacophony.
Mixed impressions, mixed times, moments conflate and conspire.
I can feel the floor under my feet, but it is illusion, the hum of sky engines with nothing below but the pummel of ground, through which I would fall, like so many flat earthed scions, teetered and tilted off the edge of the world into the abyss.
And in your arms now.
Now, now, now, rent with desire and flush faced with love I beseech you, come back my beautiful boy heart, look upon me again, eyes wide and wondering, awed in the gloaming grey.
I will never leave again.
I cleave only to the edge of time in the long fairy grass of the orchard where the slender-stemmed violets grew in the shade of the Cortland tree.
Where I walked barefoot dreaming the dreams poets forget in the long hallways of tenement walk ups in Chelsea, in New York, in the pitching gloom of a dark club, in the gum ball machine dispensing cocaine and long sea song see saw wandering back and forth the invisible lands between you and I.
You and I.
You and I.
On a tiny island in the heart of a wild bird preserve at the edge of the wilderness of men and madness where poetry still floats in the air and thrums soft and wild in the fingers of your hands on the tiny neck of the little ukulele.
Sing me your song magic man,
I am all ears.
I am all yours.
I await you.
In between the duende and the soul on a slant tethered to the moon.
Auntiebubba 