Excerpt from: Prologue

It was three o-clock in the morning. We had discovered a long night without noise from the street or the town, a night of dark water: a night with only stars. A true night.

I am writing this to create a memory, a story that I will carry with me inside. With these words, he will become unforgettable.

What I do remember first were his legs, held above the floor, long as a suspension bridge. Because he was reclining on the barber's chair, I saw him presented up to me like an extensive banquet or elevated stage to play upon. The straight line of his legs to his body suggested the infinite line of Euclid's geometry. I came across him vulnerable and unaware. His eyes were closed against the somber atmosphere of the room. He could have been under enchantment. Here was a mystery for me: a man in frank repose in that hollowed out space under the hot noon sun.

That afternoon I picked up the newly published copies of my work and dropped off ones that were due. Indefensibly, I saw him arise from leaning rocks and the sapling trees along my empty distances. When I turned the white pages of my manuscript, I thought of his T- shirt sticking to his slender chest. I tested his name aloud, where it hung in the air, and expired into the dusk.

My day was done. I could have turned towards home. The cold had come swiftly with increasing sharpness. Instead, I made my way back to the set. I headed back where the fine bones of his cheek and jaw had captivated me with their perfect symmetry; where I might find the bangs of his hair, made lank by heat and sweat, still tangling with his downcast lashes.

What I wanted most was for him to find me: to search for me amongst the few clues of my words. Instead, I stood before him, pliant and ready, dissolving into the obscurity of night, shivering from my impetuous desire.

When I stepped clear of the others, he finally acknowledged me. He dropped the cable he was coiling to remove his scarf. He placed it around my neck and brought me close. He gathered me to him, connecting us by cloth, tying us together. Within his reach, I was at once warm.

He was gone soon after to work his unwavering eye on another project. I learned patience during my countless sighs. And that diversion and substitution was a dance of diminishing returns.

When I saw him again at my door, I did not recognize his physical self. I only knew him from the response of something deep inside me.

He changed his plans to take me out. The world would not witness his finger pointing in my book of maps, the place of his birth, or the industrial city through which he hitched hiked. Only I watched as he bit into my hard apples.

For eight hours we made much of words. I listened to him attentively, then seriously. His picturesque speech crossed over to me like a sheer ship on light waves. I made a food out of his buried sensitivity. His mind was metal, rare and hot.

The distance that separated us could be taken in only two of his huge strides. My upturned wrist was the first to be drawn through the barrier. With his kiss, the penetration that had begun earlier was complete. The deepest parts of me were flooded by the color of his flesh, his eyes; that mouth.

It was a month of two full moons. We drove where we could be the august beings, on the mountain crest, past trees and animals that looked at us knowingly: I showed him the currents of stars overhead, the hidden reservoir, and an uninhabited land.

Back at my house, on the other side of midnight, he lingered. He adored my body on bent knee. He took into his mouth, my elbow and bellybutton; slipped off my shoe to caress the secret slopes of my foot. He found what was beautiful about me in my most remote regions: this journeyer.

When I came across the private forest of hair on his chest, and grazed my knuckles just close enough to transfer heat; he tilted back his chin. I could see the razor nick on his long neck. The blood on his skin was red enough to eat. He lay open to me.

Our bodies moved unerringly against each other, simultaneous sun and rain. He could not kiss me without squeezing my ass, whether standing up or me astride his lap, bouncing like a berry to earth.

He said I looked at him with misty eyes. I caught him staring at my lips. We were transported towards each other, occupying the other, suggestively.
The future lay adrift.

He called me a few days later to tell me he was leaving for another job. Aloha means hello, good-bye and love. I exported a flight of kisses, the wild climate of emotions. I lay beneath nights that fell and fell. It was the new territory that we occupied, the middle country between us that I yearned for most. It eluded articulation even to myself.

I sat where Penelope sat, before my eternal loom, waiting for my Odysseus, once again afield slowing the chase. I became the owner of discontinuous fragments, perhaps illusory and insignificant conclusions.

Nothing remained here of him. Ashes in the fireplace, his scent dispersed. Everything consumed. He was the ghost, made to the size of my house.