Nameless

I

You drove me home the long way, on nameless streets that dodged downtown. We wound around the cautioned curves of summer, geosmin the air’s overwhelming smell. Quarry rocks hovered above roadside deer, black-bead eyes wondering when to make a run for it. You said you envied that I wasn’t beholden to anyone. It’s too early for Orion, I replied, tracing invisible paths between the stars with my index finger, looking for the one constellation I can name. And each time you traced my concave places, you too were not beholden—to the woman at home in the television’s blue glow, hands on her belly, breasts leaking milk. And each time you ran your hands over my star-mapped freckles, I—who do not pray—said a small prayer that your unborn son would not end up like his father, whom I swore I’d never love.

II

What would this be, if not confined to side roads—as if that would keep us from being seen? What if our movements were not elliptical, our glances not oblique, our hands on heat-rippled sidewalks not just brushing, but flush, curved into the same sickle C-shape our bodies find in bed? What would this be if we exposed it to daylight, if the flood of late-summer sun could find us, heliophobic beneath the sheets? In the liquid midday heat, would you see how my eyes are like aquamarines? Would I see how yours turn to amber? Would I tell you, too, that in July, Orion hides in the daytime sky, his archer’s eye a hot blue giant, trained on us from 1,100 light years away? And knowing, then, that we weren’t invisible when we drew the curtains and made love in dusty sunbeams, would you say my name?

III

By fall, your son was born. The same night, with the first stars rising, you returned home, tucked your young daughter tenderly into bed. You invited me over. Your wife lay in the hospital, sleeping, with the gown slipping down her shoulder as you stole of me my shirt. We spoke in whispers so as not to wake the girl, whose breath I swore I could hear upstairs, whose ears certainly would sense my unfamiliar voice intervening in her dreams. In the corner a fish tank burbled, vacant save for rocks and lit-up water. They all died, you said. You meant to empty it. I drove home wondering whether Orion could hear me cry as he slept on his side, somewhere below the horizon. That was a year ago, and we’ve named our end once, and again. Yet we continue at the current’s mercy, like the sand in the dammed-up creek where we soaked our feet. If time can’t sink us, then we are a boat, torn from its moorings but still afloat. “Please, Time,” we both ask—“please, let it end more slowly than it began.” Please, we ask Time, when you set us down, set us down gently.