We were trying to talk about love,
and blank pain that stays blank
until music makes a shape for it,
so to know it, so to feel it out,
when you said, “Look, we’ve joined a swarm!”-
we had become another couple among hundreds
converging to get in, hand in hand, blankets
under arms, wine bottles swinging by the necks
like pendulums of old clocks. You said,
“Let’s try not to talk until the music’s over,”
but when it began, and the light was almost gone,
someone showed us how she loved a man
the way her back inclined sitting next to him,
the way her hand travelled his back and neck
as if there were no limits to her touch,
as if there had been no boundaries drawn
and she believed she had found the one
from whom to take essential sustenance
and felt no need to seek it anywhere else.
You said, “I’ve never felt that way myself.”
And then: “Maybe it can happen
for only a few moments in a life.”
All the other couples near our blanket
had made other arrangements, upright
in lawn chairs or scattered on the grass.
One man curled up with his back to his wife,
his head pillowed on the inside of his wrist,
while she sat hugging her knees to her chest
as if they had argued to exhaustion
and just switched off the light.
But soon you were drawn inside the music.
The air suffused with music and you breathed it.
Darkness thickened so those surrounding
became black cutouts melded or apart.
And you lay back, eyes wide, listening hard,
to watch the crossing of the music and the stars,
to feel yourself nothing but some chance meeting
of endless space and endless inwardness,
to float if only for a minute with the music
over touches useless, and tender, and electric.
Leave a Reply