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I am a flower because of the presence of bees.
CLICK ON SPINE 
I could not stay with him there, to lay down with him, even though that is what I wanted, an instinct as compelling as breathing is to life. So I suggested that we drive into the night, to see the stars unobstructed, on the altitude of the mountains for which we were near.
This was also the first time I rode in his car, touching a space that was an extension of him. I was happy to be inside this portable shelter that could have been a moving forest cabin for us, along the narrow road, up the withdrawn glen of Bouquet Canyon. He played the music of a longhaired master; the symphony of sounds so right along the route of trees and hidden brooks, in the night that kept us close in its darkness.
I told him to look for animals along the way, for this was the time of the hunt, of death, the nocturnal life of the riparian woods. I asked him to watch for the signs of the waterfall, a narrow strip of water that fell into shallow pools, close enough to the road that we might walk. He took out his flashlight, and as he drove, he lit the way of trees that grew from their proximity to streams and the indigenous rocks so pretty they were mined and polished. The music took brilliantly to the turns in the road, the complicated and unpredictable turns, pulsing with the shimmer of moonlight with its twice seen fullness, crossing the road and the bridges to tent sites in slumber.
I took him to the top of the mount, a place of captured water that moved in silence, and could not be glimpsed, though it lay long and deep across the fence. There was only the two of us, the only two left in a world where the wind had settled and the pattern of stars increased. Because it was cold, or because of deferred need, he stood behind me and held on to me tight, towards the open face of the canyon, listening to the whisper of huddling trees, warming me as I shivered with his rubbing hands, and his enclosing body husbanding mine.
He became part of me there, as fundamental as my eyes in waking. We had merged with the night, the hint of water, away from the earth, that had lost its place for me. I could not turn from the night, as I could not turn from him. He was my other being.
I touched myself that night, and all I could think of was the color of his mouth. It was a deep garnet with shallow grooves, inlaid with stronger hue set against his olive skin. When he kissed me with that color, that accessible tissue, the impression of his kiss would prevail upon my flesh, raising my flesh by minute degrees, tinting all that he had touched, quite red. I reflected on that scarlet opening, his mouth in my attendance, this way and that, within my mind saturated claret rich. With my fingers on me, I pretended to pull down his lower lip with my thumb, so the conch pink on the underside would show. I pinched my top lip, in lieu of his, plucking it away, stretching it, until it snapped back ruby from the pressure against a cherry need.
I saw the color of his mouth as a plumy emblem of his ripeness for me. He had put my fingers and toes in his mouth, munched on them as if they were produce from the market stalls. But, it was really his ecstatic being that was being tasted; sampled for its juiciness and firm texture that only gave way to my very astute touch. That vermilion was the indicator for our mating. It was the surface level of his blood boiling for me.
He affirmed the warmth I exuded like mellow magma aroused him. He would expertly navigate my body by the hot spikes he incurred, his mouth becoming more roseate in doing so. This was understandable from a man out of Northern Europe; seeking heat to engage and perforate, to wrap his temperate nature in. I was a woman from the tropical climes; heat was in me, low set cauldrons ready to spill.
Reciprocally, I was attracted to his bright mouth, as any native girl would be to trinkets held to the light. It was the portent that was mentioned in all the legends. I had been waiting a long time to be discovered by this western world, banking my fires, controlling my smolder, until I felt his red signal touch.
However, Johannes never knew of my dormancy. His experience of me was only as a conflagration from the second we met. We were animals in search of solar shelter. That heat was our phenomenon.
On a pyre we build our story. His hands pressing against my shoulders sent up churning smoke, his fingers raking my thighs released vented steam. I was the temperature that incited his mouth to clamp on my breast cruelly in quest of hot release.
But in my deprivation, I was cold longing.
When the moment came, I touched my upper lip with the tip of my tongue, and brought my fingers together for one last hard clasp around my nipple. The world flared bright sanguinity. I pushed my legs forward until my knees lay flat. I savored my body flaming. My flesh torpid from his caresses, sampling his memory, did upspring where his red marks had been made. And as his seed had run out of him to the sheets below, so did my concealed heat, back to the stratosphere, where it was lost again along the pathways of the sun.
To know him was to be a bird on the poems and chants of the wind, to flow upon wave after wave of flowers. The joy of Monet, painting his garden, again and again. Soon my brush strokes became voluminous, and the marks I made turned to abstraction. Iconic and axiomatic. Here music and art became one, swirling together. However, without possession of him, I had become a dragon guarding its lair, the treasures of gold and the virgin taken, were without vital exchange. My knowledge of him was refined by fire. He was my Guernica in a period of terrible cubism. The development of a martial state in the city of Laconia.
I stood in the cactus, and reviewed the landscape below, the bulldozers gnawing my earth: my felled pomegranate grove. I looked above, bewailing my loss, La Pieta, my tragic motif in the sky, perflated and elaborated. I said a heartrending adieu.
Good-bye.
Johannes: a swan left for wintering.
He was on me; his height was on me: his weight, his scent, his clear complexion, the muscles of thighs, the color and generosity of his lips, the taste of his mouth. He kissed me with the certitude of dynastic rule. He touched me while the seraph soared and the buds exhaled Frangelico.
In the family compound, all was as I had left it. The dusty street, which rose into haze by the slightest, slippered footfall, and the well in the back with its bucket like a bell, kept their primeval appeal. The dirty kitchen, an annex where the fragrant dishes like fried fish were preferable cooked, was still used. And the outhouse continued to be a fetid, haunted place. The long horned carobao, symbol of all that was wonderful, which was pet and drudge alike, lent his own odoriferous touch to the smell of loose blossoms and nuts. The sounds had not changed, but increased their charm: the washing against washboards, the clank of concealed workshops, and the birds who sung their operettas to the sun and the stars. I closed my eyes and heard my childhood as the stray fowl and pigs played like minstrels in the yard.
All my animal neighbors had left. It was as if they had been shoved into cattle cars. It was unnaturally quiet. No more roving bear, deer, bobcat, or fox. What was once eternal: the dry arroyo, the ceanothus, the cliffs, the hills, the shadows, the long canyon floor, our kisses in the pollen and stamens were now dustless ghosts. The stars took flight. There was an eerie stillness when the hammers and drills stopped. Foraging and hunting depleted; the green scent of unruly chamise gone. Fire would find no food here. There was no way to know what the season it was just by looking.
Errol saw that my eyes were bright and shiny to know that high-energy physicists had been able to detect the last of the 12 basic particles. However, that was it only in part. I was holding back tears, looking at the picture of violent encounter, and the bent tau leptons in decay and abandonment. I had seen a scientific simile to my love for Johannes.
After a midnight snack, I took his picture again. He grinned over my ineptness with the camera. His image became consecrated. With that shot, I had added his likeness to the pantheon already chartered.
He gave me a mini film festival of his recent cinematography. The wunderkind. I became in awe of his talent even more. I was so ashamed of mine. I was not worthy of him. That was the reason he had not taken me. Ethereal beings did not mate with common mortals or bandaged angels.
Still, when we kissed, we were spring and summer together, a mixed hedgerow of roses and hawthorn, a bank in early blossom, a flurry blurring everything softly.
He showed me the color of his clandestine skin and the stream of mahogany hair down his tummy that pooled secretly beneath his jeans. He admitted, "I am always taking my shirt off around you."
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