Love is....

It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray, and the body is the vehicle not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper, the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together, never mind that one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary and the mattress, curved like a preachers palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering old-time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore. There is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and steamers that sailed to ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers. But there is another part, not so secret. The part that touches fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The part that closes her neckline snap while waiting for the trolley and brushes lint from his Serge suit when they come out of the movie house into the sunlight. I envy them in their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, longed to show it—to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched for face for a long time now and missed your eyes when you were gone. Talking to you and hearing you answer—that’s the kick. But I can’t say that aloud. I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look where your hands are now.