Of California

We'd gone out walking among the sycamores. The dragonfruitcactuses, ornamenting the yards we walked past, hadn'tflowered yet, but soon would, the way what isn't love at firstfeels like love, or can. It can seem impossible that it will find,like the dragonfruit, if not forgotten entirely, its inevitable placewith so many other things that used to hold importance. Theyscarcely matter now. Why remember,                                at all? There's a wind I callmore 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 justhappens. It moved easily among the sycamores. It made a soundlike a mouth repeating over and over, as if somehow stuck, what Imistook, as he did,                         for the word senseless, but no—sexless: that was it.I couldn't decide whether what was meant was without genderor something more along the lines of how, apparently, most peoplelive: plenty of agony, sure, in their faces, but not a trace ofthe sweeter kind, the kind worth suffering for, just a little, that canmake suffering itself seem no different from any other countryat 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'thave to mean the desire for it. That's the trouble with words: soonalmost anything sounds true. This is my body, he said, lying downon the grass, if by lying down can be meant also what looked likeoffering me one last bright chance to believe in forgiveness as asturdy enough box for containing rescue. Yes, and theseare my hands, I said back, holding them out but                                 slightly away from him,lest he confuse presentation with any need, on my part, for hisappraisal. I lay beside him. Each of us silent, though for differentreasons. Neither touched the other. The strict, the elegant sycamore-shadows of California swept our faces, but did not touch them.