It seems as though I could die from grief, drowning in the fumes of your absence, though that would be far too easy. It began as a silly love letter, a few lines of overdeveloped poetry left in a conspicuous place, written in dark red, the color of your complexion.

The swirls of hair on your nakedness made me mad with want, the glorious graphic that pumped your need so deep inside me. In and out of consciousness I would fade, losing touch beneath you, your fingers between my lips, the smell of your old body.

There was a mixture cementing us together, stronger than the gold of your wedding band or the photographs of your grandchildren, that secured your hairy chest and stomach to mine in dried semen that smelled like your breath.

Strange. You never questioned why we merged so easily that hot summer in New Orleans. At least you never mentioned it out loud to me.

I knew you loved it when I called you “Dad,” even though it scared us. It was the fear that drove us. I know that now. When we were together it was the only time we accepted mortality, the inevitability of decay of these piles of chemicals we call our own bodies.

Maybe that is why I could make you cry, such macho tears through gritted teeth, while you emptied yourself into me, whispering the word into your ear just as your rhythm started to peak. Dad.

Not yet retired from the probation department, you always laughed while you cuffed me to the headboard.

“Now you're gonna get it,” you always told me, the smile vanishing, replaced by eyes that made my breath deepen and my brow wrinkle. I would breath so hard by the time you fell upon me that I was high on nothing more than the oxygen we shared.

When you are twenty-four you never expect your lover to pass, even when he is sixty-one. You never told me about the valve in your heart buried beneath the diving board of your gray, matted chest. It beat against me furiously as though trying to beat me to the grave. How strange it was that night a few days after you were gone, kneeling above you as I tried not to call out your name, spraying your headstone with my seed in the almost pitch blackness.

Sometimes I walk out onto the balcony just after breakfast on these blazing Southern summer mornings. Making myself look directly into the sun, taking in the morning air. The burning tears. I will hold its gaze until I am blinded, until this pain completely absorbs me. Looking directly into the sun until this memory of you, this vision, is burned away.

 

© 2003 Alexander Renault - Contributor's Bio