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" . . . on the jetty. . . .

"Ths evening, the shape of the night resembles---

"has revived in me---a night of the distant past."

---Constatine Cavafy, "On The Jetty,"

translated by Daneil Mendelsohn, C.P. Cavafy Poems

(2009), p. 205

I love that phrase, the shape of the night resembles . . . a

night of the distant past.  Cavafy understood how to

summon the past---for a poem about history, or love;

thus summoned, such nights of the past are never lost in the

flow of time, like fossilbearing stones in the depths of Verging Creek; or in

starless darkenings over barbwired backroads outside that

damnable Laramie, Wyoming (home to haters and clodhoppers).

The shape of this night---Saturday, August twentieth, two thousand twenty-two---is

like the one of our August nights, Fridays' or Saturdays'

(but is not your shoes, eagerly kicked off in a corner,

nor your tie-dyed shirt, flung across a chair's arm casually):

that shape is the fragrance of your long curls, the

scent and taste of your mouth, your throat, and your pits, on

which I loved to nuzzle, briefly, on my way down to those

thoracic sensual circlets of pleasure, so sensitive to a kiss or a

very slow, very persistent caress that makes them erectile; as the

last remnants of inhbition collapse and crumble, almost palpably

(silencing, too, the recollected echoes of voices, faslely authoritative

voices that whisper, or command, or shout, or shriek, "You must not!"); and the

shape of this night becomes the contours of your feet, contours

perfectly traced by the cling of those midnight blue socks

(not quite concealed beneath the frayed, tattered cuffs of your bell-bottom jeans), the

softness and warmth that have glided, in carnival delight, all over my flesh,

my clumsy and awkward flesh through which your soul converges upon mine.

Starward