19 - the one

I've found the one I've waited for

all this time I've loved you
and never known your face
all this time I've missed you
and searched this human race
here is true peace
here my heart knows calm
safe in your soul
bathed in your sighs
wanna stay right here
till the end of time.

      —Górecki, Lamb

~~~

I had begun to imagine a different routine for my evenings in the studio. I’m needing to lose weight and spend more time reading and writing. I started eating my last meal of the day at work, at my desk, 2ish. Then at home, rather than cooking dinner and sipping the Tawny, I’m brewing up Turkish coffee, using Peet’s recipe with one slight alteration: a tablespoon or so of the Especial in the bottom of the cup before adding the brewed sublimity.

Nearly 15 months since I moved from the Hill into this transition abode. I died here, so much suffering in the reflections and realization of what had come before. And I was resurrected here, a reinvention. And now this, the moment I’ve waited for and imagined. Camille stepped into my live-work space and was taken in and surprised, “This IS sweet.”

While she perused the shelves and shelves of books that line every wall, I took great care in preparing the finest Café Turkí I have ever brewed. I turned on my iMac and opened iTunes. I chose a playlist I had conjured when thinking of her that started with Lamb’s single Górecki (Global Communication Mix). I turned the Bose speakers down low and shook my head, smiling, the unexpected, desired and imagined, now real.

We sat down at the splendid and perfect Paloma table, we lifted the marvelous Anatolian copper cups and I said, ever so formally, “You must extend the pinky at all times when you sip the Café Turkí.” She smiled.

We toasted, “To poetry, to Pope, to Heloise and Abelard, and to you Ms. Durand. Thank you!” We sipped, pinkies extended. I pointed to the lamp on my desk and told her the framed Eloisa to Abelard would go just above.

Teasing and playful, she said, “I noticed you have Rodríguez’s Book of the Heart… there with your Keats’s shrine.” I laughed.

I loved that she’d read it. She asked, “What did you think?”

“Blew me away. Full-on. It got me through the break. I read it before I saw Campion’s Bright Star, then again after, so shaken I was by the story. All of a piece for me. I immersed myself in Keats’s poetry and read the biography that inspired Campion to make the film. I was obsessed, and the before and after readings were the bookends to my getting past the pain. Not sure if it could have played out any other way.”

She chimed in, “I was at Wahrenbrock's Book House downtown. I was coming up the stairs and a used copy of the book was on top of a stack along the wall. I grabbed it, turned it over and on the back, those promo blurbs, one’s from a Jungian scholar, and he admits he cried as he neared the end. I was sold. Do you remember the last lines of the book? 'The real sympathesis, the true healing among us, is love, which is the presence of the Whole Heart. Heart is everything.'”

She had committed those splendid lines to memory. She got up and went back over to get the book. I moved to my chair in front of the computer and as she stepped in front of the Murphy Bed/bookshelves, mildly mocking as if before a lectern, I shut down iTunes.

Smiling, yet serious and sensitive, she began to read the first sentences of the concluding chapter, “A life in the poem, or for it, is precisely as one has read it in the lives of others for centuries. But this life for most poets is as difficult to accept as one’s own death might be. While the poet supposes it to have been elective, it becomes altogether clear as time passes that if it was in fact a choice, then it was the most unconsidered choice he or she could make, an infinitely extensible error from which he or she can never be free. I do not believe that choice has anything to do with the poet’s work: he or she is elected somehow by something as absolute as fate.”

I was still sitting in my dorky desk chair on rollers, all enamored. She came over, book in hand, placed it on my desk, looked at me with those piercing and mischievous hazel eyes, and said softly, “Don’t you love that?” then bent down and kissed me.

I returned the kiss, rising up out of the chair. A warming and firm hug, a flurry of kisses, altered breathing, and a pause, face to face, a stirring stillness, clear seeing, and then a slowing down. We began to undress one another, a kind of largo movement, as if this might be the last time we’d ever make love, knowing, understanding, savoring, that one or the other of us could perish or disappear.

In the touch, each to each, slow and revering, and I could hear the rain outside, it had begun to pour, so, so bizarre, so crazed, Górecki’s Third Symphony, Lento e largo - Tranquillissimo entered my mind, flipping unbelievable, as if all the sorrows and wounds in the world were being felt, remembered and healed, as if all those who have loved and lost, all who’ve perished, now reborn; an other worldly sadness in it, to believe you’ve found “the one,” that all of the previous pain and suffering you’ve endured and undergone has led to this, a glimmer of hope, that love has not died, that it still exists, if only you remain open, if you’re patient in the search, in the imagining, in the creation of it.

She ran her fingertips up my thigh and I mirrored it; every part of my body she kissed I would follow and kiss hers… Enrapture, and a moving serenity, and the rain, and the soprano’s voice in my mind, and then we stopped, in the middle of the studio, naked, trusting, both of us trying to grab onto it, trying to fathom it, the breadth and depth of it, such intimacy. I turned and moved to the bookshelf-encased Murphy Bed, grabbed the handle and brought it down; and as we eased in, as our legs and arms entwined, I was, we were—lost.

Breathless moments of remembrance, a night not to be forgotten, a night that transcends and transforms, a beginning….