Now that I am older I am pleased to remember. Those violent nights. When having laid theorbo aside I came to your bed. You, having laid phonograph aside, lay there. Awaiting. I, having laid aside all cares and other business, approached. Softly so as not to afright the sour censorious authorities. You, undulating restlessly under the dun coverlet. Under the framed, signed and numbered silverprint. I, having laid aside all frets and perturbations, approached.
I remember the photograph over your bed. How many mornings has it greeted me banded with the first timorous light through the blind-slats. A genuine Weegee, car crash with prostrate forms, long female hair in a pool of blood shot through booted cop legs. In a rope-molding frame. Beside me, your form, not yet awake but bare of dull unnecessary clothing and excellently positioned to be prowled over. After full light, tickling permitted.
Prior to the meal, the Happy Hour. You removed your shoes and sat, daintily, on your feet. I loosened my tie, if the days business had required one, and held out my hand. You smashed a glass into it, just in time. Fatigued from your labors at the scriptorium where you illuminated manuscriptshaving to do with the waxing/waning fortunes of International Snow. We snuggled, there on the couch, there is no other word for it, as God is my witness. The bed awaiting.
Your head in my arms.
Prior to this, the meal. Sometimes the meal was taken in, sometimes out. If in, I sliced the onions and tossed them into the pot, or you sliced the chanterelles and tossed them into the pot. The gray glazed pot with the black leopard-spot meander. What an infinity of leeks, lentils, turnips, green beans we tossed into the pot, over the years. Celery.
Fleet through the woods came I upon that time toward your bed. A little pouch of mealie-mealie by my side, for our repast. You, going into the closet, plucked forth a cobwebbed bottle. On the table in front of the couch, an artichoke with its salty dip. Hurling myself through the shabby tattering door toward the couch, like an (arrow from the bow) (spear from the hand of Achilles), I thanked my stars for the wisdom of my teachers, Smoky and Billy, which had enabled me to find a place in the labor market, to depart in the morning and return at night, bearing in the one hand a pannier of periwinkles and in the other, a disc new-minted by the Hot Club of France.
Sometimes the meal was taken out. There we sat properly with others in crowded rooms, green-flocked paper on the walls, the tables too close together. Decent quiet servitors in black-and-white approached and with many marks of respect and good will, fed us. Tingle of choice, sometimes we elected the same dish, lamb in pewter sauce on one occasion. Three yellow daffs and a single red tulip in the tall slender vase to your right. My thumb in my martini nudging the olives from the white plastic sword.
