Of California

We’d gone out walking among the sycamores. The dragonfruit
cactuses, ornamenting the yards we walked past, hadn’t
flowered yet, but soon would, the way what isn’t love at first
feels like love, or can. It can seem impossible that it will find,
like the dragonfruit, if not forgotten entirely, its inevitable place
with so many other things that used to hold importance. They
scarcely matter now. Why remember,
at all? There’s a wind I call
more deliberate, what the deer in flight makes, for example,
a physics of muscle times the speed with which, dividing air,
the deer rushes through it; and there’s another wind, that just
happens. It moved easily among the sycamores. It made a sound
like a mouth repeating over and over, as if somehow stuck, what I
mistook, as he did,
for the word senseless, but no — sexless: that was it.
I couldn’t decide whether what was meant was without gender
or something more along the lines of how, apparently, most people
live: plenty of agony, sure, in their faces, but not a trace of
the sweeter kind, the kind worth suffering for, just a little, that can
make suffering itself seem no different from any other country
at war that, waking to, we’ve only to look down upon from a tower,
say, or a high rampart, to understand how much smaller it is than,
in dream,
we’d thought. They say the absence of a thing doesn’t
have to mean the desire for it. That’s the trouble with words: soon
almost anything sounds true. This is my body, he said, lying down
on the grass, if by lying down can be meant also what looked like
offering me one last bright chance to believe in forgiveness as a
sturdy enough box for containing rescue. Yes, and these
are my hands, I said back, holding them out but
slightly away from him,
lest he confuse presentation with any need, on my part, for his
appraisal. I lay beside him. Each of us silent, though for different
reasons. Neither touched the other. The strict, the elegant sycamore-
shadows of California swept our faces, but did not touch them.