we used to dream the biggest dreams we used to dream the biggest dreams

Photograph

I remember it as a sundrunk afternoon, heavy with heat and quiet with waning summer. We sat on the porch reading, that soft entrancing kind of reading, drugged out on youth, that Dante starts with his “noi leggevamo”, we read together, the kind of reading that always, as long as youth is, ends with a “più non leggemmo avante”, a then we read no more. One of us was reading out loud, and none of us were listening, turning the pages as we were like someone gently pushing a child on a swing, a soft push like Poe’s fire, leaping, higher, higher, with a desperate desire. Sun-gleam sequins dripped down from the lime tree leaves above us, and we would have just had to lean slightly into a kiss like Byron’s Haidee, the long, long kiss, of youth and love, the one you give only once, first and last. But we just couldn’t keep our insufferable youth out of the way. I think I might have told you I was falling in love, and if that’s really what I said then I know you said you would catch me. That’s how young we were, how silly we made everything. And I’m afraid that when one of us sits alone like Job in the ashes of our life, we will have so much sillyness to remember, cheap lines from movies and recycled emotions, that we put in place of something that was already as perfect as foliage-sequins made of gleaming sun.

I remember it as a sundrunk afternoon, heavy with heat and quiet with waning summer. We sat on the porch reading, that soft entrancing kind of reading, drugged out on youth, that Dante starts with his “noi leggevamo”, we read together, the kind of reading that always, as long as youth is, ends with a “più non leggemmo avante”, a then we read no more.

One of us was reading out loud, and none of us were listening, turning the pages as we were like someone gently pushing a child on a swing, a soft push like Poe’s fire, leaping, higher, higher, with a desperate desire. Sun-gleam sequins dripped down from the lime tree leaves above us, and we would have just had to lean slightly into a kiss like Byron’s Haidee, the long, long kiss, of youth and love, the one you give only once, first and last. But we just couldn’t keep our insufferable youth out of the way. I think I might have told you I was falling in love, and if that’s really what I said then I know you said you would catch me. That’s how young we were, how silly we made everything.

And I’m afraid that when one of us sits alone like Job in the ashes of our life, we will have so much sillyness to remember, cheap lines from movies and recycled emotions, that we put in place of something that was already as perfect as foliage-sequins made of gleaming sun.



February, 2010