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Silver and Gold

Singled out in a lime colored room

She huddled against the couch

And hung her head into her glass.

He was looking at her.

At her.

She drew a breath

And he held it for her.

A silver golden thread of

Possession

Hung between them,

A man she did not know.

She could feel him

There across the room.

She could know him

There across the space. 

How he would feel

If she ran her hands,

Slowly, across his shoulders,

Sitting in command of every

Atom of his being.

She’d trail her fingers like

Rivulets along his back.

Painted nails would slip up the neck

To cradle the jaw of

A man she didn’t know.

Her thoughts wander to this

As she sat rooted to the upholstery, 

Bare nails wrapped around

Sweating crystal. 

She kisses him.

Leans over and kisses him.

Kisses him, Kisses him, Kisses him.

This man she does not know.

What are you thnking?

She turns and blinks

A voice inside her head.

You know I saw you

You know I see you.

There across the room,

And he trails his hand across

Her shoulder,

Sends shivers electrifying

Down to her thighs.

He follows his fingers

To face her and asks

Is this seat taken?

He sits and the crystal sweats and

She bobs her head and lets out the breath

He was holding.

The threads collapse

And the corposant flame

Not burning but initiating

Like a novice to the church

Glows in the fires

Captured and belonging

Her heart flew

To the man she did not know

Six and ten and twenty and another ten, the years gather in groups rounding out to sixty,

then seventy, and we wonder and wander down chains of thoughts to the one about your mother

going to Majorca in a plane with a blindfolded Don Quixote,

drinking sixties’ cocktails on the hotel’s veranda.

I always picture an 8-millimeter movie projector version, because that’s what she showed us,

of happy smiling wives, on holiday.

She talks of the trip. Your mother talks of the trip so often you forget you weren’t there,

and she tells the joke of the blindfolded Don Quixote as the Iberian Airlines’ logo, there

on the tail of the plane that took her there, to the island of Majorca,

which you find out recently is also called Mallorca and is an island in the Mediterranean.

You thought it somewhere off the coast of Spain, just off the coast in the grey Atlantic, not in the middle of an aqua colored sea.

The chain of thinking and thoughts roll down like leaking water on metal links to a perch high above the swirling sea as a cliff diver swan sails out and over the rocks to dive straight into the waves at the base.                                    

And all the 8-millimeter film crumbling in cans in the closet,

and the guilt at not being the curator of your past as you should be,

and lament and repent to not repeat the sin of forgetfulness in caring for your past

as those around say, stop looking in the past, only bring forth and forward those things you want in your future.

I want my mother's joy, and the black and white memory of the white two-piece shorts outfit she wore with her sunglasses and martini on the veranda of that cliff hugging Majorcan hotel,  her head clothed in a scarf against the wind and sun, tied under her chin like scarves are designed to be worn, not wrapped up like Rosie the Riveter or a heavy metal rocker tongue out and scaring the camera.

Cheers, she clinks the stemmed glass to the camera and laughs.