THIS ANGLED HEART
Past the door ajar I saw
her walking. She was scoping out the hallway real good, looking for something,
I thought. For me, I thought. I loved her first for how her footsteps pattered
elegant. I pretended to be thirsty because she was at the drinking fountain. I
tapped my foot because she wore heels that made a clop clop on the tiles. I
tried to look around and fascinated by everything, because what she was looking
for I thought was a poet. Really she was parched. I'll become a poet, I
thought, to quench the world when the sea is not enough.
"You
must be parched," I said. Not anymore, she said. But how receptive, that
twirl toward me. Hair light brown, the best of yaw, olive skin, eyes
mysterious. What grace, I thought. How telling, that twirl toward me. Then
before I could say, Hi I'm James - "Hi," she said. "Bye,"
she said.
I didn't
go back to my class. Not yet nor for a while. Instead I waited by the fountain
for her, every day until we met in the garden. And when in the garden I saw her
hair light brown and her olive skin in the moonlight, I thought let's you and
me make us a baby. Lust and premonition both. In the garden she lit my
cigarette. She asked me how old was I and I did not lie. Nineteen. She also did
not lie. Twenty-five. She said very little. She handed me some seeds to eat.
They were chrome under Luna, she said morning glory. I said good morning
yourself and she laughed for me, for the first time. And lit by Luna. And I
imagined it was the first laugh she’d ever laughed. And I imagined it was the
first I’d heard. The seeds tasted worse than shit, and I had to chew them
forever. Tasted like dirt or shitty coffee. I drank my coffee black after that,
for the conditioning those rancid seeds did me. She told me the effects would
be worth it. We danced to some 45s alone in her loft above the party. Sounded
like 1945 indeed, which I sensed the way a synesthete might, zeitgeist tangible
to the primordial five. Post-War baby and it feels so good. Everything felt so
good. I the ham managed to slip the word 'dame' once or twice into my wooing. I
was still in 1945 and Duke Ellington didn’t tell me no different. She said stop
at her pants that night so I did. The next we’d sweat two pitchers of beer onto
her sheets, sweat her pants onto the floor.
Next
morning, stallioning on home. I stroll the four blocks like my life has changed
because it has. But at a strut you'd never guess how. Home and glowing still,
and on the door a note folded into an angular heart.
I would
open it, with remorse for the craft I’d undone.
Hi.
Where did you come from?
You said that to me, I like
that, I like you.
Okay bye, G.A.S.
We became very much in like
after that. Friday night sleepover and Saturday Farmers Market in our Friday
clothes. I still have not washed that pastel purple dress shirt. We watched the
puppies and the babies and we looked, for once, like a real couple. Then, once
upon a time it was Friday and the traffic had a Friday urgency to it. Folks
were speeding, switching lanes, seemed like for the hell of it. Trying to get
away from wherever they didn’t have to be anymore. A lot of them university
students skipping town like she and I were doing except most of them were
skipping town to head back home to Texas. The Texas kids got the same in-state
tuition as I did for some reason. Anyway there were too many of them. Phillip
painted the outside wall of Hog Huas Brewery about it. I backtracked and went
by there to see the stencil before we set out for the wilderness. I had a
feeling it would be gone soon, for the powers that be sure be. An enormous
Texas outline was Phillip’s message. Upside down Texas, and in the middle of
it, Go Home. Many heeded Phillip’s advice that day. She told me, "I
wouldn't mind visiting Austin someday.” She didn’t say much about her friend
down there, just that he was a friend and he was down there.
We camped
in the balmy September without a tent, just pads and a blanket we would share.
Kings River Falls out past Fallsville.
I’d seen
them on the shelf she built above her bed, below a gawky Nabokov, swarthy if
that’s what swarthy means, and ripped from a magazine, New Yorker I think. At
the waterfall she looked at me like I was high and I was when I asked her why
she collected. Grace Anne Spice told me two things and I reckoned they were
reasons. She said capacity and she said potential. She said right now all my
jars are empty. She said right now I am empty. She said fill me up. And that’s
where Jacob happened if I have to guess, at a waterfall if that’s what it was.
I have since come to prefer aquatic imagery.
For
twenty years, my life, bullion. And it was all over when Grace Anne Spice lit
my cigarette in the garden. And lit by Luna’s splashing on the morning glories.
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