October first, 1998 (play this one loud an anthem for the angels)

She sat on the lip of my bed as I played to her this song, her boots skimming up past the stalks of her kneecaps, sprouting up into the ashen stems of her thighs, a veiled skirted hem swaying in sensuous cadences inches below her torso, part of a self-contained outfit with black straps etching up past the topography her shoulder blades before sprinting down, criss-crossing her spine, X marking the spot of her deeply poetic heart from behind. She wore a vignette of what looked like a Betty Boop methed-out china doll on her shirt. She would later tell me that she chose that particular outfit because she realized then that, if we embraced, "The boots were staying on," that the goth-naughty -well-read- voodoo-doll-baby-catholic girl raiments were staying in place, taming the itching orchestrations of my lecherous finger tips by a simple assurance of her smile.

The night before we sat together in the poetry reading of Keith Ratzliffe. I had a beer and talked to the poet at the reception. We had the same creative writing class and although I was envious of her innate abilities to fuel the English language with an ardor and imagery that has seldom, I still fucking believe to this day, been matched (I was a green daschund cheeked Salieri to the magic of her Mozart) but every time I was shrouded in the presence of her breath I felt in awe.

Outside the entrance to her dorm I told her that I needed to tell her something important and when she smiled I told her that I thought she was gorgeous and then I picked her up and twirled her around and we embraced but still there was no kiss.

That afternoon I kidnapped her after our creative writing class. We dissipated into the carpet of leaves banking the sidewalks as we discussed writing and art and movies and life. Somehow we traipsed though the geometry of the west bluff and found ourselves on the doorsteps to the only house I have ever known. As I tried to kiss her lips folded into a dinner napkin and she handed me a missive and requested that I read it before the possibility of anything romantic exploded.

As I fell inside the orifice of her lips, riding the life boat of her tongue into the sweet oblivion and electric spontaneity of post adolescent amour. Both of our eyes closed at the same time. It was terse, spontaneous like a child pirouetting in front of a water fountain perching his lips at the rail of continuous fluid in search of wet nourishment.

I remember this song was played on that day, now exactly a decade ago. For some reason I wanted this brilliant Penelope scribe to listen to the shattering chords of the opening hymn like an introit to something that might have been yet never was--the way a glass chandelier snapping into triangles of ice, realizing that this crystallize emotional Armageddon droping like an end of the world avalanche inside the nest of your chest was transpiring in both darkness and in light somehow above and below you both simultaneously waiting with the gestation of pregnant goddess carrying in her womb the magic and molecules of something incubating, something fighting, something waiting to peck into the planet and hatch and breathe.

I asked her if she liked the song and she said it was ok. She was a PJ harvey Courtney Love sorta lass. She wasn't into the moribund New Wave alternative anthems that had shepherded me like a maudlin metronome through the nihilistic teenage perils of youth.

We left my bedroom and walked back to campus that autumn, our hands forming one solitary bouquet of fingers--a tugging orb buoyed in the scent of a new found connection. She told me that today was her parents' wedding anniversary. We walked next to the house where she would live in a years time and where our rapport would end in heart-fraught-with-splinters-and-thorns fashion but for that moment, the plainsong of her smile pushing through the hyphen of her lips made me feel that the end of the world and the world to come had somehow lapsed without me knowing and that this sheet of time currently was disintegrating into a sea of random quarks and neurons and that all that existed was the sight of her eyes, the scent of her body and the newness found in the interior cusp of her warm palm squeezed tightly in mine.