"A Loincloth for Jeremy"
by
Timothy Stillman
Hi again Jeremy, I watched you last night while you are sleeping. I wonder if this is how I sleep, also. I watched you naked beside me, your penis raising, your chest broadening in your mind as it exhaled and inhaled, broadening, for in your dreams, I've no doubt, you were thinking yourself a man. I touched you with the very edge of my fingertips, as though you were new music I was inventing. I stayed awake all night watching you in moon glowing. And growing in my mind, in my eyes that did not get gritty at all, being awake all night.
I guess I said I love you a million times this last week, never out loud of course, and I love you now that you are sailing the friendly warm summer sky over the Sandias Mountains where the trees are tall and our love was taller. You were so delicate, so filled with bones of baby birds. I was so shy and so scared. And you were beautiful. They call New Mexico "The Land of Enchantment" and it is that, magnificent place, even the air smells noble and fine and of honor here. You were enchanting, and you held me in this place of much history and much courage.
And you gave me courage as you gently took off my shirt, and your mouth in that precise little bow of thought as though you had never seen another boy's shoulders, then chest, and then more, before me. You pretended and it is fine, a pretending thing. I looked at you at five a.m. this morning, moments before you woke up and we made love again. Making love. Odd endeavor. Arms and legs and penises and balls and faces and emotions, entangled and dancing with each other, and all the secret things. Feathery feelings and missed opportunities, and love was for us to 69 and love was for us to touch every part of each other.
Our own private arroyos. Our own private caves and mystical depths. Mescaline, which I tasted with you, this week of our love, could never have made me higher or happier than I was with just you, in the quaint Old Town of our Young Love. I asked you please, and trembled, and you pulled me to you and did not tremble. The tremendous heat of your body. The overpowering veracity of their surely being a loving kind God when I saw you naked, and when you saw me naked and did not laugh or make fun, but pulled me to you and kissed my closed eyes and let me weep just a tiny bit.
I shall live in the fullness of this week. I shall stretch it into moments more and next week and next year and the year after, I will be here thinking of you. The boy on the hike on the Sandias, who I glanced at askance in the tram, and whose eyes would not let me turn away, here at my foolish little job of reigning up and down the mountains the trams, a summer job of little money, done last summer too, free air and green trees and snow piles sometimes, but this time there was you, this time there was Jeremy. And I will not grow into the man I would have grown into without you.
We loved behind the trees, away from the tourists and their cameras hung round their necks and we loved in the coldness of the air way up here and I felt you hard in your jeans as I scrambled, free sudden most of shyness, to pull them off and to see you naked, to see you rise and proud as the most noble of history and heritage. Dear Jeremy, to see your brown eyes again, to see you on the plane winging its way back to your home, you enveloped in it, I thank you for the consideration. I thank you for the sweetness. I thank you for the sex and for its turning so ardently into making love.
I never imagined a boy could suck my cock, I never imagined anyone would. To feel your tongue there and lathing it, and touching it and your mouth eating me as though I was candy, as we lay naked and the sky was blue and the air was cold and the summer week was hours and a magic potion, an elixir in a sky world where forever takes on an immediate meaning, a deeply personal and importantly small wanderlust of meaning, like nets of love thrown out all over the world. To capture sorrow. To capture hurt. To bring all such things to us for us to touch and linger with and fawn over and make better.
You have taught me how to laugh, I never used to laugh. You have taught me how to be generous, when I never was before. You have taught me delicacy and have treated me like a flower that is a miracle and deserved more tender soft grape peeling care than I had known before. You have let me worship you and pray to you and make your skin and bones thus mine as well. You have fingerprinted me with you. You have played with my naked body and walked your fingers up my hips and paused at the arch above them and then slid your fingers down me, sighing ahhhhhhhh, like they were mountain climbers suddenly fallen into most excited crevice.
You have dreamt your dreams and you lay your head on my chest and I held your cock and felt you sigh softly and so happily. You might laugh at this as you read this letter on the plane as I've asked you to, but I see you as a strawberry Sundae on a hot summer day, in a cool soda shop, even though you are dark haired and dark skinned, to me you are a strawberry Sundae, and next semester you are a high school senior, while I will be a junior, and you will go out into the world and you will have your fingerprints on me. But by then there will be more than mine.
And the glass will turn cloudy, and the softness of the grass on which we made grace with each other will be a more and more distant confused memory. The sharpness of the air here, the clarity of vision here, the meanings that seem so precise they almost angle down in sheer cliff stone dropping, and all of that will be a memory, and I did not mean to wake you up. I wanted at five this morning to kidnap you and take you to the mountains of the cave dwellers, to kidnap you and carry you up bundled in love the ladder, then push the ladder down and we would dwell in the dark of love and the bright incandescence of it forever more and no one, no one, would ever find us.
But you woke groggy and sleepy and stretchy and you pulled me to you, and we are friends, no longer lovers, polite, engaged in the disengagement of pulling away from each, tasting distance further and further between us again. And to think, my god, you didn't want to come on this vacation with your parents. What a fight you told me you put up. Pouting on the plane, all the way here. The horror if they had not forced you.
I would never have begun life. I would never have ended life. You are my god, Jeremy, the music of your name, the giggle, your being Jewish, of never having encountered a foreskin before, and how you loved to rub the sheathe up and down, like a little kid with a tinker toy or Lincoln logs. Oh you smiled at that, Jeremy and I got to see what a circumcised cock is like. I loved it because it was beautiful and because it was you. You touched your mouth to my sheathe pulled all the way up and then you moved it down with tongue and teeth and lips and we giggled and it felt so tickly and happy and lovely....
You are lovely, Jeremy. This week you made me a boy forever. This week I made you a man forever. And we will never be together again. And that is my misfortune. That is my sad conduit to giving love, and that is the making of love for you and someone else, many someone else's. I think you learned more from me, a mere novice, than I meant you to, because I wanted to hold you back to me, not give such clumsy lessons that your quick mind and sharp wit can make bold and ballet like. But to love is to give love. There is no other way. And if love given means love perfected later on for someone else--it is of this I find the saddest thing of good bye.
Fools use the word "closure" a lot. Closure of a business deal I can see. But closure of anything human, anything important, very good or very bad makes little sense; does the mind somehow drop the unwanted memories and feelings off the mountains, brush their hands and walk away, never to remember?, or take a hair pin curve on high sky roads and toss the memories and feelings down into infinity and oblivion and cacti and brown ground and multi hued flowers and bushes, there to lay broken and unneeded and as if it never existed at all, even to itself? How does the mind--the heart--be trained for such things. I think I never want a mind, a heart like that.
I do not see how such a thing is possible. I guess you have unwrapped your package by now. I asked you to do that before you read the letter. To wait forty minutes after the plane had taxied off the runway. I hope you enjoy the present--a buckskin loincloth, I made it specially for you; the beads in it of course are just colored glass, but I hope when you stop laughing (stop it now, oh go ahead, I smile thinking of you opening it and laughing that happy chirpy giggle of yours) and when you get home, you will dress your loins with it, be completely naked save for it, and remember the warmth of me for a time. And if occurs to you, I might like a photo of you in it, and you in you too-----))))))
So for a time, you can note this week:
When an Indian boy of berry colored skin and dark eyes and so much history and past and lore I dare not think I will ever find myself in me, fell in love with a New York boy named Jeremy, and the sky was huge and the Sandias were beautiful and protective shoulders that huddled over us and around us and blessed us and taught me how to love and kiss and suck cock--I love saying that--so naughty--so wondrous other worldly sounding--so fly home Jeremy, fly home to Manhattan and autumn and the start of a new school year and cold coming in bold and blustery, there in the city of tall skyscrapers, and soon very soon winter arrival--snow in Manhattan sounds truly lovely--all those shoppers, and street corner Santas, and cups of hot chocolate in your parents' brownstone--and the Christmas Tree in Central Park--oh how I wish I could be there with you to see Manhattan in winter, but I can't. You will not allow it.
So for a time, if you please, remember a boy who fell from the sky, on whom you one day took pity, under a sky and clouds that looked like ice cream and marshmallows. I fully believe if we could have touched that sky, we would have seen it felt just like that, and if we could have eaten that sky--well, then---
It was nice knowing you Jeremy. I will never forget you for a second. I will love you and keep you young and I will pray to you every night. It hurt so when you said to me this morning that you would never come back here, as you held me and rubbed your tender hands on my back, down to my ass, because it was all so perfect and you didn't want to take the chance, for either of us, on the perfection being tarnished in any way. How it hurt. How it always will. Your saying it. And the truth of it. Hey, I'm the Indian around here. I'm the one with wise old sayings and mystical incantations. But I know you were right. For me as well as for you.
Fly home, Jeremy Potok, and remember for a little while, Little Bird.
P.S. I guess now I can tell you--you so afraid of commitments, you big tough man, you :))))) I love you.
So there. Consider yourself loved. That wasn't so hard, was it? My Jeremy. Enchantment seems to have gone from my land as I write this as you sleep inches from me as I watch you, and see poetry and longing and the past glass and the future glass inside you and inside me and wonder where either of us will ever wind up..
Go with God, Jeremy. Personal prayer, from me to you.
the end
B Keeper silvershimmer@earthlink.net