By leaving, I feel to regain some sense of myself, though I long to be with you. I can’t take this waiting—waiting for you to get off work, waiting for you to touch me. And then to have you reject my touch. Oh, I cannot take it. I must leave. All I think about is you. Like an uninvited guest, despair knocks at my door.

I saw her look my way. Her sidelong look indicated that she would pick me up. Like a romantic fool, I bent down and plucked a few roadside flowers. I threw my pack into the car. Then I caught my breath as I handed her the flowers. Her face white like cream and her hair jet-black. Her gaze through dark eyelashes penetrated my meek offering; she simply laid the flowers on the dashboard.

I sat with my hands folded in my lap. She startled me by asking, “Are you American?”

But it was her second question that ran through my heart like a saber thrust—“What do Americans do when they are sad?”

Words seemed only a pretext. Suddenly it became a question decided by a fork in the road. Archchon was to the right, while Pamplona was to the left. She answered it for me by veering to the right. I sat back, somehow reassured. Doesn’t the passion of rejection come from being moved?

We drove in silence. The highway gave way to a two-lane road that led to a beach resort. She stopped and asked that I wait beside an oak tree for her to return. I sat dreamily looking up at the sky and wondering at my fate. Never had I encountered someone so startlingly beautiful.

“What do you call a hill of sand?” My answer came as we pulled to park alongside giant sand dunes. “Dunes,” came my reply.

We walked at a slant.

The sun-dappled water was scattered with bathers. She laid out a towel and removed her shorts to reveal a trim bottom. Shyly, I turned to see where birds were scuttling in the upper reaches of the dunes. When I turned back to Mari she had removed her bathing suit top. She said, “Et tui.”

I removed my shorts. We walked toward the water while my cock became a sundial. Before I could get to the water, it stood at twelve o’ clock. Sunbathing was new to me. I liked the idea. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. The water helped me relax, and I felt less the tug. It simply hung heavy.
We sat upon the towels and I gazed at her nipples. My attention turning on a wheel between her supine body, the ocean and the dunes.

Salt turns into language as I imagine the taste between her legs, our bodies entwined, her/me naked. Ropes of come traverse the sky. I am bound to the moment likeGuliver tied down by the little people. Every time I turn, I see some new portion of her body. I am younger than melancholy. Her sadness becomes me.

I am moved.

I lay in the dark, naked under cold cotton sheets. She is warm. We have not spoken a word. My touch is shy, but I’m hungry. My loins outline the crouch of her upraised hips. She likes it from behind. This she tells me with words: “It is the way he fucks me. He doesn’t kiss me on the mouth. He fucks me from behind. I put my ass in the air. And he fucks me good.”

The sound of the ocean adjoins our room. I lick my fingers and slide my hand like a wet washcloth over her breast. Then I latch onto a nipple, a nipple like a piece of cordwood, knotty and hard.

I am not a friend to the day. She makes me wait to only see her. I am not strong. To be lost is a kind of leaving. These thoughts I jot down as I sit swooned by a bluesy guitar coming out of a residential brownstone mansion. Upon its stately curb I sit slugging red table wine. I cannot find myself back to that room, those nights long ago. I only know this anguish, this dire uncertainty. I am not strong unto myself. This woman has painted hope across my hearth.

It is for love?

Back, back to that night came the knock upon the door. Her eyes as a promise. A smile, a modest smile. Her lips lightly pink. Eyebrows dark, black pencil dark against stark, translucently white skin like alabaster.

Eyes that penetrate the soul. I just want to kneel and hold her hand. Shyly, she laughs as I take her hand and I pass my lips across her lips that suck, tug for my lips. By drawing away my lips I turn full throttle upon her neck. She receives me like a cat. Her body taut, tawny. I stop kissing her. She looks at me sadly, and I feel the tears of the Madonna.
My heart aches to cry. She stretches me out like the crucified Christ and sucks my nipples. Then she starts lapping, her mouth is liquid fire.

I have to push her away. “No, not yet. I am going to fuck you.” Soft light spilling through the green sheen of light seeping from the bathroom anoints her prone body. Between her cheeks I nuzzle my nose, sending my tongue out like a relief agent. I lean and pull her up by the buttocks, then nudge up behind her and pull at her arm. She rises and turns her lips to meet mine. We are two upraised figures. One arm is behind her back.

The next morning she calls. “Do you still respect me?” came her throaty whisper. I felt that the world was a hard place for her. I wanted to make things right. We talked about parts of the earth, including Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Malaysia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. I was ready to forgo family and country in one fell swoop. She would return to Bordeaux. I could come.

I have been set loose. The cat has a life outside the time we took one night. She has no time. She keeps me like a domestic animal.

I am excited to see her, and it’s decided I will go to Pamplona. She takes me to the highway. I ask her to marry me. She is uncertain. I love her. Her eyes tell me the same. She kisses me. I am twenty-eight. Never have I felt left standing on the edge of the world. Nothing seems to matter. She holds me like a locket. She looks into my soul. I hand her a hundred-dollar bill as a talisman and tell her it will be starter money. I want only to settle down with her.

Now, as I write in the dark, I am no longer as hopeful as I was when she left me along that highway to Pamplona. Then I possessed hope. Now I concede defeat, I am broken and beaten down by the very blight of my condition without...

To continue to exist, to know myself apart, I walk as dawn touches off the street and into a spattering of blue sky, I enter the train station. I see the big clock and I wait until the sun becomes fierce and I board a train south.

The first thing I said was when I caught that first ride, that ride that carried me away, down to the bulls, the running, the nightmarish streets of Pamplona, sleeping wrapped in newspaper? “I met a girl and I asked her to marry me.”

I felt I would die in Spain. Anarchy ruled for a night in Pamplona. We huddled in circles propagating our fears. I left their smoldering fires and I sought solace as a walker. The cold night transformed the streets as hospitable. No longer did I harbor fears of violence bred into the activities of the day—the killing, the blood-splattered sand. Hooves, men running, throwing themselves in harm’s way.

Gray became dawn that found me a wreck upon a bench looking up at a sky blue. Shaking off the cold, I sought out a path filled with sunlight. Further to go.

I chased my dreams across acres of time. I thought I saw her in Portugal. Lisboa, where I ran amuck with a band of junkies. We jumped a trolley, caught a cab, lurked in dangerous places, drank wine, and I sat quiet as Francisco shot up and laid his Indian head upon my shoulders. That’s all it was: a moment of quietude. We sat in the upper reaches of a park upon benches. And I watched as each of them had their turn with the needle. Chain to life.

Further to go.

Back in Bordeaux. This precedes the writing the note. The note will be written, all will

come to naught.

I call her. She tells me that eight hours later I can see her. Fuck you, my heart howls. I can’t live another moment. I can’t suffer, but I do.

Degradation. I am buying wine for a free-spirit. He mixes it with cocola. I tell him this is no cock and bull story. I love a girl, I tell him. Women pass by and stop to kiss his beautiful free face and throw gifts at his feet—joints, money, cigs.

He is playing a three string guitar. He doesn’t care. He is living in a jungle, living up a tree, he sings loudly and plaintive. We drink.

I turn my face to a pane of glass and I see my lips have purpled like a plum. I have drunk with abandon, my cares to the wind. Won’t return my love. Drunk out of a dying sense of self-preservation.

I remove myself from sleeping with her. She lays prone, inviting, lurid as a gypsy. She calls my hand—“come to bed.”

Do not forsake me. The hour has come. A bell tolls. I close her door and I sit in the dark. My hand flutters over the page I have written. Alone like Christ, I give up the ghost. I look not to what I wear, I will be provided for. I look to the birds that look not after raiment. And I observe how well their needs are met.

Surely someone as lowly as I would warrant as much as a bird.

My hair has grown long. Women present themselves to me. What is it? She cannot decide. She has placed me in the balance, and I tilt the scales. I crowd her world. My sense of freedom scares her. She is ambivalent. Libra’s cannot decide upon such grave matters of the heart. I learned this too late.

The river flows beneath the bridge and I sit gazing at the water. It will be many miles later, but I will meet a girl and she will deliver me from this torment and doubt. Little did I know it would be via hell. Lured into the Medina. Head hazy with hash among domes and minarets, by the ocean where the Rock of Gibraltar looms, I’m in a port city. She lies naked and spent. I run my hand along my shaven head. I step naked out onto the rooftop. Lights flicker and the cityscape is cast in shadow and a thin moon hangs waning upon a night sky twinkling with stars.