Infatuation (Dec. 1, 2004)

... I gave you bright teeth,
immeasurable longing.
So it’s just that you should give
your love in the same measure.

-- anonymous Irish love poem,
15th century (transl. Thomas Kinsella)

I wrote my first secular words
in longing for she who
ferried you from antiquity
into my tongue, my taste,
my impossible irrepressible
undeniable savor for
this song to you.
We were both juniors at
the makeshift high school
at my father’s church in
Chicago & it was 1972.
I fell for her at first sight,
but she always had eyes
for others, mostly those
darkling dapper Puerto
Ricans whom city life
had sharpened to a bladelike
gleam. Alas, my edge
was soft and buttery,
nursed by overheated
orange-groves down south
into a pulpy twang.
I was just some lanky
dorky dirtyblonde kid
who said the words of
God and heaven and
their promised eternities
too often: all spirit and
no wave-dipped cock,
virgin that I was. Oh
how I burned and yearned
for her in her swank flesh
-- soft blonde hair
and icy blue eyes, full lips
and fuller breasts which
always seemed in insurrection
against blouse and sweater
in the manifesto which
was slowly building in
my desire. Sitting next
to me in History or on
the bench outside
smoking cigarettes in
the cold, she was my
pal of sorts, confidante
to every agony save the
one that burnt me
worst; she confided
to me in every
detail her ache for
Eddie who had one
night danced her
into a lather,
swept her off then
nailed her in some dark,
only to flick her off
soon after, like the
butt of a Winston.
Months, a year of desire
built in me as I watched her
watching everywhere
else but toward me.
Nightly I prayed on my
knees to my
pentecostal God
for deliverance from
that cross which burned
so much hotter and
powerfully than Him;
and later, underneath
the sheets, I’d dial her
up, wrapping my length
around her curves and
milking the hot honey
of her smile in one kiss,
our bliss, at my loneliest
and furthest and too
abstract last. Such
reveries only made days
worse, a jailhouse of
blueballsy ache where
I was ever walking a
dark cold shore alone
calling, calling out her
name amid the emptiness.
One day I sat by Lake
Michigan in the heightening
cold of late autumn, and
sang to that minor key
of waves and the high angels
of northern wind--singing
much as I once sang
at three years old
to Big Toe my toad
in her yellow pail;
emptying the ache and
burn in a lyric turn
about sailing across
great waters to her,
of finding and embracing
her at last. I wrote
a lot of lyrics that
way those days,
and in those first
raw moments of
singing pen on paper
the old music arose
again in your salt vassal,
your next endlessly
requited knight of
riven blue. It was such
dorky iambic drivel
filled with loves and doves
descending from above
into another freezing
day: Songs I wrote
down in my first journal
more than 30 years
and 300,000 pages
of paeans ago. Eventually
she and I did kiss,
out on a group date
where everyone dropped
angel dust and she
got way too high,
finding her desire for
me at last and least
up on those high
aeries where I searched
for her. A reach of her
hand to mine at the
back of a darkened
movie theater and
then her face turned
my way -- I could
not see it as I had
so dreamed, but I felt
some shift of strange
honey toward me --
and then that one
long kiss, sixteen months
after I first yearned
for it, 380 nightly
railings at God to
deliver me or her to me.
How shocked I was to
feel so little in the
actuarials of delight,
as if the angels who
brought us together
had suddenly dived
beneath the main--
her lips against mine
in one swift connect
and then that susurration
of entwining tongues
& a wash of heat
nougating huge darkness.
Then I opened my
eyes to watch that
stranger’s closed face,
not my beloved,
which never for
the duration of that
kiss acknowledged
me there, not the
way I thought that
long-waylaid kiss
at long last would
welcome me home.
No, she kept her eyes
closed the whole time:
And then, like someone
who’d just gassed up
their car, she pulled
away and focused on the
movie, giving my hand
a squeeze, another,
and one last before
letting me go for good.
And that was it.
We remained friends
through that last
senior year, but in lieu
of finding more in
that final kiss, I felt released
to go after other girls
with the darker intent
of getting laid at long
last. The high bells
would not ring again
for years. Delivered thus,
I also left that faith
which had scourged me so
those nights of deeper
ache. Requital, hell:
I was all about ponying
up to that darkling mare
with the wild curlyhairs
& yankable underwear.
Jongleur now of a
harder lyric, I preened
myself for communions
out-of-doors, in glades
the old gods sported
sprawled and spurted
in hot praise. My voice
here is still lost in that
wilderness of song,
desperate to cross the
waters and shore you
here at last, on the page
at least, having long
learned not bedded
sheets will ever yield
that kiss inside requital.
Still today, I’m infatuated
with the sound of
every pretty girl’s laugh
as she walks by --
a merry tinsel sort of sea
I mimic with this minstrelsy.
That’s as close as we
will ever get, my lady
of cathedral song:
A verse in thrall
with your sashay
down every naked shore,
desperate to light
one look in your blue eyes,
perhaps the faintest
of all smiles, the opening
of all doors & all the
bells between God’s heaven
and your sweeter hell
ringing, ringing, ringing.