A Sail to Great Island

Woman

14 Woman A woman is a sometime thing, Satchmo sings on Christopher’s copy of the Porgy and Bess Satch made with Ella Fitzgerald. We’re back from a day at the plage at Cassis. All those breasts bared to the sun, the melons, the ripe strawberries, oh, a woman is a sometime thing, like strawberries if they’re in season. This woman in my life could slip out of my life which is why Christopher’s photos haunt me at first, and not just the sad ones, Sabine in her exotic headdresses (to cover thin or absent hair), but even the one in the kitchen, Sabine with bread and butter before her, smiling with love at Christopher, her hair pinned back carelessly, since love has or has not ended. (Is death an end to love?) Oh, a woman is a sometime thing, and a man too, and the happy conjunction of love. To taste this fruit means a kind of knowledge, Satchmo is telling us. A woman is, and someday may not be, but a woman is delicious, his hungry, experienced voice is telling us, Oh, a woman is a sometime thing, like the light, like the day, the one and only day 15 with this woman at that beach the clouds will not revisit, not those same clouds, not those same rays of ultraviolet and visible light, not the same look of love on the woman’s face, as she sighs with pleasure. ...