Six Minutes

I looked at the clock It was 11:00 I closed my eyes and you dove into me like a dream into an ocean of fantasy Amidst love and anonymity that can only be known in New York City, you turned to see the face of my solitude and kissed the pulp of me; a perfectly untouched fruit; you peeled into the pulp of me

I looked at the clock It was 11:00 I disappeared into you as you disappeared into me The way cotton candy disappears inside the fresh mouths of boys Like time holding a memory, I held you inside the pink naked Earth of me, without gravity,

Floating in a sweet muted numbness that exists only in the best of our bodies’ sleep

I looked at the clock

It was 11:00 Like a finished song floating toward a lap of silence You carried me to a place where sex meets love To a place where lust meets trust Without the safety net of a morning afters certainty And for once I didn’t just look at the ceiling I looked at the clock

It was 11:00 I closed my eyes and understood why Chagall paints the way children dream,

why Maria Callas died of a broken heart, why Shakespeare wrote 154 Sonnets

And what Nina Simone meant by the Twelfth of Never

I looked at the clock It was 11:06 You shot me into the sky, free, forgetting my skin, screaming like an animal freed from its cage A shooting star that should have been a comet, because even six minutes wasn’t long enough I crossed the beaches of my childhood and remembered why laughing at home will never be the same as laughing anywhere else

I held the babies that had yet to be born from me and

For the first time spoke truly each syllable in the word intimacy I saw Adam kiss Eve under the forbidden apple tree and felt what it must have been like to live and love in Eden before there were so many confusing you’s and me’s

This is what it’s like to finally love in simplicity I looked at the clock It was 11:06

In just six minutes you disgraced the face of every critic that had turned his nose up to this love that great poets write of You defeated every ex-boyfriend that attempted to rock, rescue and rejuvenate my world without ever rocking me You taught me why lovers cry in the same rhythm and sound that babies weep And I realized that there was no way we could ever be close enough,

Our bodies stimulating as much as alienating There just aren’t enough moments, looks, silences to be shared in the naked palm of God Or enough poets to write of those moments,

Those looks and the silences we shared in the naked palm of God

For those six minutes my heart was more desperate than the letters of Anais Nin

My tragedy was darker than any role Maria Callas had ever lived,

And my lust was sicker than the eye of George Bataille

I looked at the clock It was 11:06 For six minutes you washed me the way rain washes angry heat

Off the sidewalks at high noon on a day in August

You shattered me the way a Harlem Gospel choir shatters the eardrum of a devout Catholic You bore into me the way pain buries itself into pleasure, heard me the way Beethoven’s music will be heard forever, knew me in a way that made it right to call us lovers

And for the first time I let someone else break and put me back together,

Which is more than I’ve ever let anyone else do in all of six hours I looked at the clock It was 11:00 I closed my eyes and you dove into me like a dream into an ocean of fantasy I looked at the clock It was 11:06 In six minutes, for all of six minutes, I came, and came, and came and came © Copyright 2003