This picture of his face and torso proves to me, at last, how he appears fundamentally. I always forget the precise geometry of his face, though his body is easily remembered by its aquatic simplicity.  By looking at his picture and calculating in the lines forming down his nose, the crinkles beneath his eyes, even the wavy hair ascending farther up his forehead, I realize nothing can stem his beauty, even the ruins of time and injury. Technically, he has never looked so perfect to me. For in this acutely emotional moment, heedless of the world, through his engaging posture and facial cast, he desires me completely.

 

  It had been a month since I had heard or seen him. That Saturday afternoon, twice he demanded to know why I had not written or called. He told me, he had just finished a project nearby, and was glad he was working in L.A.

            "I want to work in town, he explained. Traveling is hell. I mean it is still exciting. But I want to be a local guy, so I can stay in town and spend time with you. Seeing you just once a month isnt enough for me."

            When he found out that I would be attending a screening in Hollywood, he quickly blurted, "And Then I'll crash the Directors Guild and kidnap you."

            But he didnt want to wait until the following Wednesday; he wanted me as soon as possible, that Monday night.

            I volunteered to meet him anywhere. He suggested his house.

"You'll be delivering yourself to your own kidnapping then."

            I drove to the base of the sparkling Hollywood Hills where his pre- war Spanish studio was the smallest inset in that quarter. The persimmons that I had picked for him fell from the basket and onto the floorboards of my car, disordered as I was. Thick shrubbery and narrow pathways darkened my way.  I backtracked through the winding streets several times, just missing his address. And when finally I found him, his patio gate swung wide, with him backlit in front of his open door, before a flickering television screen: he was pacing.

I crossed his threshold without being lifted. I looked at his blue-harbor eyes, so beautiful. They shattered me, taking me down to pieces.

Once he saw me, I could tell he was not pleased.

I kissed the side of his mouth where his lips were down turned. There had been three blackouts that day and he was concerned there would be no electricity again. I also suspected his Teutonic character did not appreciate my tardiness.

             I was dressed like a bell shaped curve, in a long skirt with tulle at its hem, and a ribbed peasant blouse a shepherdess would have chosen. My colors were twilight, the lavender, turquoise and gray of a half moon sky. Repeatedly he said, I like your attire; I like your attire. And smiled as he looked me over.

            His apartment was quite tidy and illuminated from a variety of sources. He made a flourish out of switching the halogen light on the clay cherub above his door for me, and installing a stadium sized bulb, into the ceiling socket that he had newly wired over the kitchen sink. Tea candles in jeweled cases were lit on his counter top, and in the bathroom, another glowed like a warmed agate.

            There were dishes to do and I gamely pushed up my sleeves to assist in the washing. I dried and put away like a good kitchen wench. During this time he chatted about the importance of domestic comfort, like getting matching silverware at Pottery Barn, and buying a house that he could pay for in full after two good years of work. He even wondered aloud, why the house of a co-worker, though tastefully furnished, did not resemble a home.

            His small bungalow certainly did. Parts looked as if they had been broken away from a castle keep. He heaped his couch /bed high with sundry pillows in exotic styles; draped the openings of his window, hall and desk niche with sumptuous textiles the colors of fabled Aubusson. He had in a reading alcove, a damask cloth for the chairs headrest and on its adjoining wall, a woodcut, in a floral motif. Perhaps, I even glimpsed a flash of something gilded in a dark corner.

            Modern articles, well chosen, contrasted with the baroque embellishments. An art deco blender, more sculpture than machine, presided geometrically over the kitchen galley. Arranged at an oblique angle like Dr. Caligaris cabinet, was his tower of audio- video equipment, the toys of his profession.  His 71 surfboard was a graphic totem pole in somber corporate pinstripe, leaning against the kitchen wall. And in vintage black and white hung a panoramic poster of the docks in Hamburg, brutish and cold.

  I put myself before his things, used them as covert proxies; so later he would sense my fragrance in the soap, which I had slipped between my hands; or reflect upon my swollen lips as he drank from the cobalt glass that had touched mine.

He made remarks that I tend to remember fractionally, saying he preferred to spend most of his time at home alone, and that I was the only woman to visit recently. I heard these things distantly, and believed them only as phantoms of my attachment burning.

            "When I first came to your house, I didnt think you liked me, he admitted. You preferred that I lead."

            My specification for him to take the initiative was because I was too overcome to trust my interpretation of destiny. If he could not take the risk of rejection, and have the motivation to reinforce his words with action, then how could he prove his feelings to himself? Only he could decide for us the spectrum of perceptions we would occupy.  However, when he did come to me under his own will, he brought with him the height of a hero, strength, desire, blue eyes that passed through me like nation of birds, the wild scent of lust, the dark scent of magic.  

            However, when he left, he carried off everything, the wet skies, the stars in bold relief: everything. He was a conquistador with his huge sack filled with my temples and tribes. When he disappeared, I fell asleep, asleep for a thousand years. What remained was the residue of myth, the wooden chanting of my defensiveness.

Nevertheless, my hope kept on quivering long after.

            In a way it was good that our parents sent us to boarding school, he mused. It helped us learn how to be independent and how to take care of ourselves.

            He grew up grateful for riding in farm vehicles, the motorcycles of his classmates parents, shacks they built in the woods, the space of the country: freedom.

He only knew of families as sardonic; and that love was a circumstance, very far away.

He chose only to do well at, the things he liked.

And on the list of things he liked to do, I was not first.

However, when he was with me, I was his flock closely tended. He stocked the green pasture I grazed upon. His eyes were my blue waters. In his great hands, my dreams were carried. When we were linked, life breathed peaceful and potent.

            The problem was, when he lefthe left without any reassurance, and everything lay wasted and unattended.

            The nearness of him was setting me on edge. I couldnt form complete sentences or complete thoughts. I babbled on like I was oxygen deprived.

His drain board in picturesque disarray.

The cracked, uneven plastered wall around the light switch.

The poetry of his turned back. Bent.

 I forced him into the odd angle of my arms.

He dove osmotic ally towards me.  We fell like from a waterfall, gathering speed from a dizzying height, completely covered so light could not reach. He kissed me deeply, ceaselessly, his mouth still searching for me, blue eyes shut, lost in sensation, even after I had quit my part. He crumpled and whirled aside the material of my skirt to wade between my bare legs. He introduced his fingers into my mouth, smeared his carmine lips across mine, penetrated me delicately, and captured my tongue. Our kisses became a river of rubies: turbulent enlightenment and pleasure. More than once he dropped to his knees to hungrily lave my midriff expanse until the darkness was all gone.

I told him that if he came to me despairing, he left reassured. As he bid me adieu, I noticed he was full of productive motivation, a dragon slayer made ready again.

"It is nice that you can be so confident about yourself," he commented wryly.

            We washed more dishes, edited out some drink ware and spun into in a few more kisses over the stove and near the pantry door. His kisses never had a beginning; they were the sudden gusts of the Sahara. He falsely mounted me over the counter, twisting himself so I would have the benefit of his inflated width and breath. He ground himself into me, arching his back gracefully with the emphaticalness of a volleyball player serving. He seemed to be amazed that sucking on my fingers would transform him so greatly, and that even my outstretched painted toes when licked could produce such profound affects in him.

He always made me look at the results of my alchemy. It was like being tracked by a polar sub.

            I sat in his brown leather wing-backed chair, nestled in an alcove. I massaged his head and face with my fingertips, and made waves and light circles around and around his exposed neck and shoulders. As he relaxed into my touch, his sub-consciousness was divulging itself to me lucidly. A few times he spoke of three unrelated subjects at once, including a bit about a train, which startled him.

            "There is a picture of me somewhere in this house, as a little boy," he related.

           " What do you look like?"

            "In it you can see my innocence; my adventure."      

 The study of fleeting motions while we passed pretzels and a banana smoothie between us.

The shadows thrown as his feet shuffled across the carpet to a digital beat.

The mystique of absence in the lack of family photos displayed.

We were even in mid-gesture and simple talk, always compositions of affection. Our hands were like the great butterflies of the Chilean timberland, ready to alight in flight into each others tangles. Our conversation was fractured and some times illogical, caught as we were in a wilderness of poppies.

On the phone, when discussing the activities for the night, he predicted: If we do go out in public, it will only be to see a movie.

 Only theatre darkness could hide the barbaric feasting of our lips and sighs. But we did not need to be entertained or witness anyone elses vision when we were creating pure forms of beauty ourselves in our possession of one another.

            We moved to his living room/ bedroom couch/ bed. He put on a tape of his short film. I was riveted, incapable of breathing. I saw images so lyrical I wanted to cry. It was the story of an Argentinean beggar boy, sustained by the wisdom of his dead mothers words. After it was over, I wanted to shriek and jump. Instead I took off across the short room, pounding around in circles, trying to dissipate my overwrought excitement.

            Each frame of the film, I keenly inhabited. I sensed the forced bravery of the urchin, smelled the youth off his unwashed cheek, heard his sorrow as the cars passed, felt the roughness of tombstone and hardship. He had implied so much by the deft wave of his sensorial camera.

            Then I glimpsed an alternate view, of another son, who could not prove to himself that he was lovable enough for his mother to keep. Hadnt she told him he was her dearest? Where was she when the nightmares came and the wounds bled deep?  Where was the father, abandoning him to others to protect and teach?

            He and his brother took toys and candy that was not theirs. Their predilections for specific loot made him chuckle. But stealing was as a symptom of unsatisfied hunger and need; it vilified the provider and insulted his authority.

He showed me videotape with a much worn cover: a movie that reminded him of his childhood feats. It was an adventure story, the daring deeds of boys who were released from parental sway. I had seen the trailer: an accidental killing, a village by the sea, but could never bring myself to watch the movie. But Johannes viewed it repeatedly as an examination of his own rebellious youth, his wildness, and his recourse for what had perished when he was only eight.

Still and all, his shy caring spurred his industrious mind, and led him to the junk heaps for salvageable parts. He invented a tandem bicycle, an engineering solution for a little girl who could not ride. She wore long skirts, bound by tradition or strictness, odder than the rest, an outsider. She was one who didnt fit, just like him, having been left out of the family institution, the educational system, a country of practical solutions.

It was his friends and classmates that would make up his flexible kin. They saw him mature, turning his hand to help another, a growth less obvious than his uninherited height: a process that his parents took no part.

In the movies he most enjoyed, revenge was invariably just and excessively displayed. There the pain was reliably administered. He liked being scared to death.

Not knowing how or what, he knew early on that he would put himself in pictures. He boarded trains with older boys without permission to see restricted movies in far away towns. He did this knowing he would be punished. That punishment meant being sent home.

As a director of photography he made biological what was only a play of light. He articulated concise dramas from electromagnetic pulses. He became the source of vicarious escapades, dropping his dreamland images on top of the viewer like a supplementary skin.

Now that he was incorporated into the celluloid realm where his reveries could be projected, what did he see when he closed his eyes and that crimson light pierced?

He put on his compilation tape of his commercials. His name appeared on the screen. I yelped reflexively. Johanness name in pixels was my favorite photon. He insisted strictly that I quiet down to listen to content of the following pieces. Properly chastised, I sat silently, but was stunned that he had harshed on me like that.

I saw quick cuts of utopian worlds, a visual text of surpassing strength and subtly. The fluttering Chinese dancers fan tailed sleeves hypnotized me. I was charmed as the indigenous Mexican children perched like parrots in the jungle canopy. But because my feelings were momentarily hurt, all the pictures took on a bruised hue.  

Nonetheless, I could not deny he was a commercial cinematographer of intoxicating sway. He created worlds too full to need words or song. He posted a hundred little marvels that were like jazz to the retina.        

Those images were as narrative as the azulejos of Portugal, those blue tiles of vigorous and quickening panels. His vast aesthetic empire transmuted Nike and AT&T into suprasensual realms that expanded past the 31 diagonal screen to the depths of dreams like the psyche reflected. It was an archive from the future, gleaming and shinning, and shrouded in spotlights, reflective lights, and the opposite, a darkness that was disturbing. The surfaces he created were separate domains awash in tempest. They were also pictures of rue and lavender for sweet and sad remembrance.

However, it was all too disappointing that his winged images escaped too quickly, chasing after the next, expending themselves in glorious flight.

 Concurrently, I was trying to salvage his parallel reality. I scanned each shot as a visually acute and meaningful excavation of his interior view. The pictures he amassed returned to the lost forest of his past. The girl with the stylized headphones like corkscrew antlers was him charging through airports attuned to his electronica. They were quixotically his impressions, his chronicled interpretations.

 In them I also tried to find myself.  Through my dreams, I had joined him on his away shoots, wondering how he was, and what he produced in the Silicon Valley or Austin. Here were the edited after effects.  Had I influenced his eye in the filming? Was there a recollection of me in the negative space?  

            He asked for my opinion and suggestions for the order of his compellation reel for client consideration. I advised he take cues from the techno music he favored, and build up a mood like the D.Js did on his favorite arrangements. But I was no qualified consultant. With his talent and accomplishments as an artist of science and industry, he did not need my paltry reflections on the arrangement of his work.

 Nevertheless, I did find the black and white ad for the play Cabaret quite soothing as the scenes faded in and out. And I actually thought the outtakes of the sarcastic actor, ribbing the production for its pretentious angles and moody European lighting, quite a refreshing way to finish.

Absolute perfection induced neutrality in me. I preferred rough edges, seams showing: like a face inscribed by lip and eyebrow scars like his was.

However, I realized on him, these were like facets in clear gemstone. He was too opulent for me.  I was too unrefined for him, unraveling, undone.

Then I saw him in his film, fall from the sky, unharmed.

Afterwards, he balled up my socks and attempted to make a pillow for his head on the rug. I crawled on top of him and begged, "Let me be one of your groupies."

            He answered, stuffing my greedy mouth with more kisses. "You can be my number one groupie."

It was the opposite of infinity: it was deep and revolutionary, my eyes dazzled by the epiphany.

            I spoke my mind, what was in my heart. "This is where I want to be. This is what I dream about: to be here with you."

            He was momentarily still before he awkwardly got up to ostensibly stretch the cramp out of his legs. I went to the couch to put my socks and boots on, covering the places still warm from his kisses. 

            Because it was late, I told him I had to go. He was not happy about my announcement. He put back his pullover and T-shirt, and looked around the room as if all his gadgetry and ornaments had let him down.  I proposed a way to prolong the evening together. Immediately he agreed, needing nothing more than his muffler wrap, his telephone book and the keys to his car to change our venue.

How taller he became to me.

            Inside my house he examined my Christmas tree and decorated mantle without a word. He used my bathroom without asking, and stored his shoes beneath my foyer cabinet as if it were his usual habit. The French soundtrack music he requested was what he had heard before.    

He put a flame in the fireplace and sat down on the black, high-backed lounge chair before it. He extended his legs, resting them on my ottoman. What I served on the low table, he ate completely, except for the vegetables, which he regarded suspiciously as garnish. We talked in low tones, smiling often. It was one thirty in the morning, six hours since we had met. He grew sleepy and longed for bed.  I told him to stay seated, and I rushed for my cameraever a preservationist on duty.

            I conceived of the shot before I closed the shutter. He let me take his picture as he had let me discover his dimensional body. Slowly, he opened his lips and thighs to me, and made himself vulnerable to my instrument.

He then, determinedly strode into my bedroom, where he had never slept before, and burrowed under my covers, cozy under my multiple layers of wool, and goose down. I could not join him without performing my nightly ablutions first, which I did, but not in the adjoining bathroom. He understood my need for modesty. He also sympathized with my need to wear warm bedclothes, but requested nonetheless, that I choose something he would be partial to.

I wore a negligee like a blue veil of smoke. It revealed the body that had been molded by his kisses and the intent of his words. I had saved myself for him for such a long time, even before I knew him, even before the pain of missing him burned my eyes.  

When I joined him, I could not pretend that it was an ordinary occurrence, that having him in my bed to hold all night long came as routine. I was giddy and anxious, and mistakenly used my teeth. He was excited, inviting me to explore him unreservedly, and was disappointed that I would not succumb to him.

Engrossed in the business of unqualified pleasure, he was so far away from me: his thoughts, a house of closed doors. 

I heard him praise my gentle fondling.

"Your touch is amazing; that feels so good."

There was light coming out from under the doors.

I could only touch the most essential part of him with my breath and my tongue. I was a child again, playing in secret with a favorite toy. I had a fascination for that hidden flesh, its fragrance, its warmth, and its conversion into gaining heft.

But my lips, when directly applied to him, did no use. My mouth was a fixed portal, circumscribed for a lesser man. How I stretched and plunged for him, leading to mediocre results. Fortunately, I dove down in pulsating rings, a new method for me, and an effort that he did applaud for.

It was only when he encircled my hands with his, and we united together, did he begin to reach his true potential. I joined him in rhythm, in pressure, engorging his protracted course.

Before long I saw the curving trajectory of his growing bar, and knew it was compliment to my moistening vessel: the sign of my miracle.

I had my white underwear on; cotton boy cut shorts that kept me covered like canvas over a tackle. He licked me through my protective casing, bobbing his head forward with his tongue furled before him. I lifted my hips to reach wave, after wave, but could only feel pressure and chafing against my nervous sargasso. When he looked up, his face was crossed with frustration and exasperation.

"Why cant you just relax?" he demanded with a coral barb.

I heard the click of the doors locking.

The touch I had for him was not to ignite the senses of abundance.

Mine was more retrospective. My hands landed on his thighs with the delicacy of a swans neck falling. I petted his tip with a soft stroke, smooth as rain off tree ferns, letting him feel the tears of loneliness and elation I carried inside.

His large hands crossed me like a Visigoth on horseback. Every touch left me in romantic ruins.

I sunk deep roots into him to find his mineral deposits.

"Your touch is so caring," he spoke as I searched the hideaways of his body for enchantment and melancholy to harmonize with mine.

I dropped upon a century of leaf litter, overturning loam and enigmas.

"Your touch is so caring," he observed through my arborescent world of untamed joyfulness and raw expression.

 He looked at the area of my tailbone, caressing me tenderly there.

"I am very attracted to this part of you anatomy."

In the end, inventiveness prevailed, and satisfaction was meted out with me on my belly and his hands directing my hips. Eschewing penetration, he stroked my body with the purity of moonlight. I purposely kept myself hushed in order to hear his expressive cries, and to feel the shudders that I could not see. As he came, he caressed my lower back in concentric circles, rubbing himself in.

It was five- o clock when I washed myself in the shower. I was a ship with signs of the wind carved into me.

Whenever I left or came back to the bed during the night, he groaned twice, and then arranged himself around me. We were always touching, always entwined. In his sleep he smiled for me as if he were wind surfing. But I could not rest. Behind my eyes I saw his studio apartment in all its complex vignettes, and his commercials, those blurred images of remote illusions.

The next morning, I watched him dress at the foot of my bed. He found a hole in his Calvin Klein underwear and a bleach spot on his pants. He teased me about fainting at the sight of him as I had told him I tried not to do the previous time. He was such a beautiful sight, naked while the sun rose.

I slicked his lips with almond oil, parched as they were from pressing his mouth everywhere upon me during our extensive night. At the door I threw a sweater over my spotted negligee, and buttoned it at the top. He smiled at me and kissed me. Then he smiled and kissed me again. Smiled and kissed me for the last time. Three shiny smiles. Three shiny kisses. From the car, he gave me his funny wave, straightened his rear view mirror, and was off.

Another night without my name said once.

   

 

Johanness face had always escaped my retention; it was unassignable, like a blue flame moving. When we were in direct orbit, I would look upon it resolutely; a mariner lost in the task of stargazing, but remembered nothing after he had turned his attention away: neither his tint, nor his dimpled grooves had I kept.  His changing aspects were those unsettled lands that fell off the edge of the map.

So when the picture came back, I was mesmerized by the results. I could not believe his elegant features and the richness of his expression could reconfigure onto lifeless paper. In it, he is regarding me thoughtfully, as if it were that moment again, that chemical reaction we share, never inert, even in print.

In this picture, I delight in the random pattern of scars upon his face and scalp, and the one caused by a surgeons scalpel when he was a child to anchor a wandering testicle, that I may have kissed unknowingly in my complete worship of him.

His lips belong to an earlier age of satyrs and nymphs; they are an extravagant color that bleeds past the mouth onto the surrounds like a stain left by a tightly clenched cherry.

His large hands are the ones Michelangelo carved into decisive David, resting on his flat tummy, in contact with his appetites and next to his masculine jaw as he indulges his voyeur.

His body is slender and lithe, the gymnast, the karate practitioner embedded within his tight sinew. He has long legs, mighty from accumulated sport, and thighs of tacit intimidation.

His eyes are heavy lidded from exhaustion and want.  

Between his legs emerges a succulent bundle, rich in sap and thick with tissue, riding high as a ridge and long into his lower abdomen that cannot be attributed to the elevated creases in his tight pants. My eye pauses there in this shot, often imagining the bulk amassed, muscular like an octopuss head and tentacles; and without rigid armor or strengthening bones, so that I might squeeze it thoroughly with a very naughty hand.

            A few hairs spring through his shirt collar, and there are those that extend past his wrist to his hands, like hash marks in a Van Gogh painting. Underneath his loose shirt, I know, there is chest hair in extreme. The hair on the back of his head is growing sparse though, showing translucent skin, and the elevated scar from a boyhood axe wound.

However, even with this flaw, I am vulnerable to his attractiveness. In him, I can see the thoroughness of God, and for this reason, I feel insecure. He is too much for me. I fear his attention to me may only be a transitory cause. But he is all man to me. The man. My man. And made for me.

In this picture all his emotions are surface elements, open and powerful allure; desire without civility. This near, if I step back from him, he will get up and reach out for me; if I step closer, his arms will only have to fold me tight; then his eyes will surrender, and his mouth will try and seize mine.

In his slightly open lips, and legs invitingly spread, he beckons me to be with him, to take his warmth and hardness into my body where we are naturally fitted.

I know intuitively that no one has ever seen him so peaceful and so yearning. No picture, anywhere, exists that captures him so narcotically sexy. It is our private glance.                          His face is still flushed from the kisses he planted behind my knees. 

In his eyes, he holds the admission he uttered before we left his hillside reliquary.

I need you. I want to sleep with you for eternity.

I held the camera before him, after midnight, after he had followed me home, because he was incomplete without my body against his. But in this picture, no camera exists; nothing can separate us, when we are transfixed by one another.

 When I think of us together, I dont imagine us doing anything in particular, he confessed. I only think of our passion.

            In his eyes, there is contentment to see me so near. His aroused smile is my sensual providence. His expression as I pressed the shutter, soft.

 

 

Whatever is worth remembering is worth photographing. To be photographed is to become objectified through convenient utility. Photography of an adored one is iconography.

Holding his picture takes the event out of sequence. I can remember our previous times by reviewing this new stencil.

I have used this picture like an aboriginal talisman to ward off would be suitors. I keep his picture covered, afraid that the gods will be jealous, and take him away.

 This picture has also kept me chaste, for no others appeal to me who do not match his photogenic likeness.

He is nomadic; his picture is stationary. His work is ephemeral lasting no longer than flowers. But his artistry flies high as birds, high as commerce.

 Viewpoints change. The formal and informative beauty of the cinematographer elucidated by my camera. I was his camera; the lens turned inward towards his radiant mind.

It is what I miss the most about him: his candid spirit intriguing me. His singular complexities have kept me focused on him. Only him. Principally, I hate this picture for its muteness.

Taking his picture was sly eroticism; an acknowledgment of his poignant longing for the one standing before him.

In my capricious scope of him, he is looking out from the picture at me, stimulating himself.

Without this photograph, I could not speculate, or deduce the narrative of that nights mystery with any certainty.  But perhaps without me behind the lens, the man in this portrait does not exist. Perhaps it was the camera itself, which provoked him to look at me so.

Photography can reconstruct intention. He looked into my lens, defining his imagery, to reach forward into the future, to remind me over and over again that he was not present.

But his expression also negates why he is not here with me now.

 

This picture is transcendent. I see the connection between his eyes and his work, his hands, his tawny skin, his blood and his heart. I feel beneath the surface, the muscles that cling to the bone, and the pulse beating rhythmically for me.

He is oceanic, but his control does not stop at the shore. The force he exerts is equal and corresponding to the one I have for him. It falls exalted from his sleeves, his lips, luminous feelings that are left glimmering like gifts from the sea. 

 Anyone who views this picture will happen upon our intimacy: a look that presages love.

 I gave him this photograph to do what his touch could never do: be fixed forever. He has become the curator of my fantasy, my caresses extended.

Pictures are ideal worlds better visited than the ones we occupy. There are no threats of separation. No prayers in the dark for the one you want, who will not come.

 But pictures fade. Leaving only the intangibles.

This picture was the last consequence of my amorous piracy.

He never asked to take mine.

It was a significant detail perceived slowly.