Spring
The days pass one by one. On top of the mountain the sky is always clear and the wind always humid. Each evening at sunset, when the heat breaks, he becomes your sun. He pulls you into orbit around him; the heat is from his body, the light from his eyes. You try to take all of him but he’s too much for one man to handle. His surplus flows from you in fluids, in breath, in words, and it’s inevitable that in their rovings his hands, his eyes, his mouth shall retrieve the parts of him that you slough off. This is the cycle: day into night into day, him into you into him. But the light and the darkness remain discrete and distinct, while you and he blend together, become inseparable, indistinguishable, like lichen. It’s pointless to say that if you remove one the other will die: there is no one, there is no other. This is not the general product of love; this is the product of your love, of your ecstasy. Some people give birth to babies. You give birth to each other.
Germination was a tender touching process, soon over: seeds split like broken zippers, shoots push into darkness, trusting that this way lies the sun. Growth seems a funny purposeless thing until suddenly the closed petals of lust burst open, revealing the naked desire of need and want, of love. In your thirst you drink the poisoned blood of the one you have named lover. In your hunger you lick the shit from his ass and the pus from his sores and the fungus that grows in his eyes and mouth and feet and fingers. His drool is your faucet, his piss your shower, his cum marks the end of your days. You take the pain of his every illness and injury inside you; a thousand times you take the seed of death from him and let it bloom within your body. In the end the strength of the need of your love exhausts him, chokes him as the vine chokes the tree. He withers within your grasp, and together you crumple to the ground.
Fall
He will call you when the crows fly thick through the night. You will go out and walk under cover of darkness and falling feathers and caw-caw-cawing for carrion. There will be neither light to see nor air to breathe nor room in the thick atmosphere to push out words, and the only thing you can trust is his hand in yours. Its bones are thin, frail, light, the bones of a bird, and they pull you on and on, past your town, past the farms that surround your town, into the empty uncultivated fields that lie beyond the farms. In long cold dry grass he will lay you down, and his hands fluttering across the expanse of your skin are a bellows, blowing away your clothes, igniting the coals that, for him, are always smoldering in your body. He has given birth to you once again, and now you reach for him and attempt to mirror his passion: he kisses you and you open your mouth, he ties your arms to the ground with grass and you don’t pull against the weak roots, he lifts your legs and aims his cock at your asshole. The muscles in your ass shiver and try to pull him inside of you but before he lets you have him he plays a language game. “An exaltation of larks,” he spits into your ear, “an ostentation of peacocks, a pride of lions.” He lifts his head then, and you see that he is looking at the dark shapes flying overhead. “A murder of crows!” you scream, and he fucks you then, and morning never comes. And if that’s not love it will have to do, until the real thing comes along.
Winter
You lost him one night in a tangle of sheets. He disappeared into a drift of snow and was consumed by a pile of paper. When the white had finally finished its task you found yourself with only frozen toes and a damp hollow in your bed. Yesterday’s news is your only information. Cheap sentiments fill your mind, false memories in which your life together is reduced to a discount vacation package of pastoral picnics, Caribbean cruises, and sweet lustless sex. Outside your window the world is frozen solid; the only movements are signs of further decay. Tree limbs snap in the wind, squirrels eat their frostbitten toes in a vain effort to stay alive. This stillness is your only consolation, for you tell yourself that as long as the world remains motionless you will move no farther from him than you already are. Cold comfort, this, for when he left you his leaving was absolute. Eventually you leave your bed, your bedroom, your home: you cover the white skin that covers your body with clothing and walk into the fields west of your house. They are bare now, covered with frosty soil so hard that it chips under your feet like shale. But these fields aren’t fallow. Last fall you watched the farmer plant his wheat, and during the warm afternoons you could almost see it grow. When the frost came it died, but you know that all it awaits is the spring thaw, when it will burst from the ground. In the middle of all this you stand. You watch the slow minuet of objects and shadows. Your own shadow curls around your body like a vine as the moon moves through the sky. I watch you from the other side of the window. If you ever come back I will tell you what I can see from here, which perhaps you cannot. For your lover, Gordon, you are the frozen earth. The façade of death is only temporary, and I promise you that one day you will both be born again.