Hail Mary, full of grace,
We shouldn’t have and we almost didn’t. We were one floor below my sleeping lover, and the sleeping classmates we both loved. Graduation day was coming. Who was sleeping? We weren’t. And if they were, I suppose I’ll never know.
the Lord is with thee;
I like to think they were. I like to think we were alone in that dusty apartment, three a.m. In that sad, crumbling building, like two people on the moon are alone. Blood rushed in our ears. It canceled out all nightsound. No cicadas sang in the wiry trees. No wind swell. No bobcat or coyote. If there was anything outside the tight link of us we didn’t care.
blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
We stood apart first, then closer, then finally nose to nose, so close we could smell the heat of our bodies. We can still smell it. We offered the broken fruit of our mouths and then knelt like penitents. What is it but worship when we yield our mouths like this?
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
We shouldn’t have and we almost didn’t. We kept stoking that weak pulse long after our bodies were in different cities, long after any chance to complete the circuit we’d built was lost. Yet we still think about it. We still write about it. We fill blank page after blank page.
pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
We saw ourselves from the distance of the old people we will someday be. We were young and beautiful then. We were an unexpected, brief passion. We loved the sadness because it made us work. We marveled at the sight—the dropped crutches, the leprosy, cured. We reached for the hem of the garment—a frayed concert T-shirt, a pair of dirty cutoffs. Our mouths hung open at the miracle—the power of one illicit kiss in the middle of the night.
Amen.