PHOSPHORIMENTAL

LDF first appeared on http://www.rebellesociety.com/2012/11/04/lovely-dreaming-foxes/

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I grab the key, attached by a lace of leather to a foot long piece of restoration wood.  I look up at the wall behind the counter. It’s 1955.

There she is. Lover has been wearing the same sneer since the dawn she was drawn from the womb; only today, I notice it has softened, faded. It is even more perfect.

She had the cerise lips of Calliope, pensive and piquant. I never saw them pursed or closed. Instead, the corners of her mouth curled into parenthesis around some sardonic remark about to be made – yet all this time, I had never heard her speak a word.

Exposed below the weight of the cosmos, I imagine curled-up dreaming foxes in their dens and I close my eyes and she fades into existence. Clarity in crisp blue jeans, poised with hips sweeping up sensual imaginings from a corpus of creative possibilities.

My lover is standing on a cold brick sidewalk of a city affixed firmly to the soles of her black suede boots — as if the earth would fall out from beneath us if I were to lift her up. The profile of her face is obscured by strokes of deep mahogany tresses, woven with striations of brushed brass. I study her smooth and flush skin, the curve of high cheekbones, and the gentle bend of a gloved wrist as she tightens her black scarf.

Her eyes encase the hematite pupils of an Asian leopard looking out from the low-shadow foliage at the edge of a verdant jungle. She surveys the cityscape, neither waiting nor wanting, with an unfathomable gaze; one I’d always hoped would look at me.

But this visage is not of a wild cat or vixen – it is Venus herself, with an attitude; the North Star of any struggling author.

With a proverbial pout and the prancing tailbone of a pinup girl, she threw off an essence like a tart would throw off her bathrobe.

Her chimerical image had always existed in my darkest fantasies and this fantasy was set on a frigid January morning in Great Neck, New York.  The exposed skin of my face became so viscous in the cold that I could not get a sense if there was any air around me to breath.

Entranced, I could only speak to her as I inhaled — from a distance too far to be heard, “where does our love go today my dear?”

She just stands there in the frozen air while vapors of breath slowly sinuate around her lips. I can almost taste the spires of frost that linger for a moment on her tongue before they melt in the warmth of her mouth.

I love her – so much that my imagination cries for a higher voice; one that beats the chest of eternity for just a shaved second of time before it disappears into the clouds of passion. I hunger to just walk up and share the mist she exhales on the crest of her words—words embedded in sigh after sigh, page after page.

As I follow the contours of her hips she spins around toward me, and the camera flashes to capture a spirit fleeing into darkness. Our eyes lock and the transcendence of destiny resumes, ripping open the promise of time; expelling zephyrs into the stillness and light, sending off little parachutes of hope, like soft threads from dying dandelion blooms.

Bone gripping, I shake with awareness. Love’s presence is lulled from the shadows, sucking the dampness from our skin, leaving us brittle and shivering.

Our bodies fall into the sheets, compelled by austere climates only made for lovers and writers; torsos pressed and hewn into statuary, resisting the rime of the season… in this time of reason.

Lying there naked and twisted in linen, chenille, and legs, we agreed later that January evening on this one thing.

We were silently pondering the darkness; soul kisses and caress cast sparks around us like embers flicked from the flames, softly floating down in the blackness, like crying stars – or what could be moonlight ricocheting in the eyes of lovely foxes falling asleep in shadowy depths of their dens.

She says what I am thinking, she always does this,

“I love you isn’t enough of an expression, to convey what is going on inside me.”

We stood beneath tree limbs sewing dying leaves into the moonlight and casting a colorful sundry of seeds – strewn like bottle caps and old spark plugs in saw dust.

We spoke of conditions through silent and mutual understanding and carved our identities into a distressed wooden counter with a ceramic handled knife.

The agreement was to love beyond definitions and titles. We would simply be city creatures that today, and who knew what came next; tomorrow was the first day of February.

Immortal souls such as these chase each other through the trails of time – stirring the Milky Way into confections of white nights and deserts, love forlorn, and… pictures of calendar girls tacked to the wall of an old gas station… such as this.

It’s 1971, and a brand new red Chevelle Super Sport just pulled up to the pump – ain’t she a real beauty.

tis nothing if not heard

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