"More than four minutes in a greenhouse"

Delighted at the ferns that curl away from lightest touch, as we

rush through before it's too late, the day becoming

evening, we discover -- by the pond, close together in a

wooden pagoda -- that all of this presumes a

sort of foreplay: we can't say it aloud, but we

seek to share more than experience with each other:

strawberries for the ride, squash soup at her home, pizza

sitting on the cold stone rim of a fountain -- she

asked me the five-word question; I said "I'm

not sure if I do" --, cool glasses of water we

hold instead of hands at a table barely

big enough for two (it does more than do, keeps us

close in the reaching and listening to more than

music -- explosive watercolor guitar and drum's

principled attack to the gut and deep breathing -- our di-

vided at tension from trying (not) to touch): all of

this presumes more than four minutes in a greenhouse: a

hothouse day grown to date in her town, in the

shared and shaded soil we shouldn't have found, the giddy

flower of latest-night tumbling around the halo-

descent stairwell of the parking garage. We

got lost driving home, finally crossed the right

border with each other, nearly hit deer jumping

headlit across the parkway: "Are you okay?", my

hand behind her head, my

fingers in her hair with lightest touch.

(Finished 2 August 2009, edited 11 and 10 July 2009, begun -- as a single line, a sort of seed -- 7 November 2006, in an email only recently rediscovered during a hurried pre-sabbatical archiving. Just as that email was mine but new to me, so the places and expressions in the poem are familiar but charged with energy of changed memory and dream: as the ferns curl, the feeling curves away from fable towards the reality of only moments.)