Words are auspiciously chargeable, and none more so than dynamic.
One ought never find oneself to be compromising the feeling of seeing something
for the first time, the ambitions of a romantic imagination,
for the overtures of adulthood austerity. Nothing is as void, or
irredeemably defeated, as a desire to open oneself to holidays by the hour, open
only three times a year to the feeling of rich, warm neurological
flow of these feelings. But when you see it in someone, how do you let that someone
know what you think of them, and still be adult? Of course,
in repertory galleries and leafy city-outdoor sculpture museums,
at the bustling dinner tables of locomotive-speed European restaurants
and at times when liquid-crystal green glowing playlists
of sombre jiving guitars, drenched in wine, are most appropriate.
Thankfully, this way looks like a panel of canvas, broken up with obliques
of red. If not yet adult, I hope its playfulness will be enough; if poems are to be
dynamic like Juliette, then they need to learn to play, excitedly and secured.
In a fluorescent coffee cream glow of walls, in a Parisian
photography gallery I can’t say the name of— let alone
write—we are trapezing into Plossu’s dichromatic
vistas, leaning on the curb, the sand dune, and the rock.
You ask if I can hear the cicadas, the hum of Italian country in the heat;
when in this gallery, I could only hear the ultra incandescence of lights
percolating in the mezzanines, new clarity espousing with the knowledge
that Paris, and you, are both wonderful.
Yes it was when later, under a dousing of amber lamplight,
lying legs bent at the knee with poise, and their flurries we settled on a bedspread,
you stroking at the plexus curved round my libido, the cream top of two palettes,
me imaging brisk black leggings strolling gently over the tarmacadam,
the delta central to your collarbone and the breath from the valve in
your throat during a Latinate vowel.
Somewhere in this is included a constant sexuality and tempo, film reeled,
jazz drumming us on the back row of the theatre, touching for an instant,
noses, the distillation of character, and the glee with which
I can remember that Sheffield was good for an amble.
Somehow, lightly, we slept off modicums of speech platitudinising my fears;
and instead had pulses of an unfelt issue, which encouraged my
seeking of mythical and tautened realisations hereon.
The sound of your voice weaving reason was so nice, even the flyers
for life alterations didn’t turn up. (And they commonly do.)
Invariably first was your witticism and the red baubled trees,
hanging as the art lesson adventures of January children,
I was duly counselled on the court. And dually were your eyes,
obliquely there: sublime, looped, your irises were round, hypnotic,
like the bold city distilled in a noetic, emulsifying some trodden
exquisite foreground in the mind, the faint pathway of a childhood walk
wrapping me happy, and certainly pledging me warmth,
easily running a finger down the apex of my face in profile,
and pedalling breast stroke into expanses of memory pools,
dark hair tucked into a pink cap.
Should the memory continue to dive, meander and keep,
I would have it that it will usefully pacify me when I sleep.