Your Most Profound Skin

Fathom its gilded secretWhere all is but a fleeting flameWhich bursts and blooms into acharmed roseFrom which springs an exquisite perfume--Apollinaire, "Les Collines"

Every amorous memory retains its madeleines, and I want you to know, wherever you are, that mine is a fragrance of blond tobacco that carries me back to the ripeness of that night, to the luminous moment of your most profound skin. Not the tobacco that one inhales, the smoke that papers one's throat, but that vague, equivocal scent that the pipe leaves on one's fingers, which at a certain moment, with some distracted gesture, raises its whip to summon your memory, the shape of your back against a sail of white sheets.

Don't look at me out of your absence with that rather childlike gravity that makes of your face a young Nubian Pharaoh's mask. I think we always understood that we would give each other only the pleasures and casual excitements of drink and empty midnight streets. But I retain more of you than that; in my memory you reappear nude, turned over: Our more precise planet was that bed where slow, imperious geographies were born of our travels, of welcome or resisted departures, of embassies with baskets of fruit or hidden bowmen; and with each pool, each river, each hill and plain, we won new territories amid the obscure murmurings of allies and enemies. O traveler of yourself, machine of forgetfulness! And now I pass my hand across my face with a distracted gesture and the fragrance of tobacco on my fingers brings you back to tear me away from my accustomed present, to show your antelope form once again on the screen of that bed where we traced the interminable paths of an ephemeral encounter.

With you, I learned parallel languages: the one of your body's geometry that filled my mouth and hands with tremulous theorems, the one of your different speech, your insular language that often confused me. With the tobacco scent, a precise memory now returns that holds the entirety of a moment that was like a vortex. I remember that you said "Don't" and I didn't understand, because I thought that nothing could trouble you in that tangle of caresses that made of us a skein of black-and-white coils, in that slow dance where we each pressed against the other to relent to the soft pressure of muscles, of arms, revolving slowly and unraveling to form yet another skein, repeating the passage from top to bottom, rider to colt, archer to gazelle, like hippogriffs face to face, dolphins arrested in mid-leap. Then I knew that your complaint was another word for modesty and shame and that you could not satisfy this new thirst as you had the others; you pushed me away in supplication, with that manner of hiding your eyes, of putting your chin against your throat to keep all but the black haunt of your hair from entering my mouth.

You said "Please don't," and from where you lay on your back you looked at me with eyes and breasts, with lips that traced a flower of slow petals. I had to open up your arms, to whisper an ultimate desire with my hands that passed over the sweetest hills, feeling you relent little by little and turn on your side to offer the silky wall of your back, where a thin shoulder blade was the wing of a fallen angel. I troubled you and from your hesitation would be born the perfume that now returns me to the modesty that preceded another accord, the final one, that carried us to another trembling response. I know that I closed my eyes, that I lapped the salt of your skin, that I descended, turning you back, feeling your mid-section like the taper in a pitcher where hands are thrust in ritual offerings; at a certain moment, I became lost in the hidden, narrow path that denied my lips their pleasure while everywhere, from your highlands and low countries, your modesty murmured in abandonment of its final resistance.

With the fragrance of the blond tobacco on my fingers rises again the stammer and the tremor of that dark encounter; I know that my mouth sought your trembling mouth, the only lip that still encircled your fear, the ardent pink-and-bronze contour that admitted my farthest voyage. And as always, I didn't feel in that rapture what memory brings back to me now through a vague scent of tobacco, but that musky fragrance, that exquisite shadow forged a secret path out of its necessary momentary forgetting, an unnamable game of flesh that hid from awareness the movement of the most dense and implacable machines of fire. There was no taste or scent then, your most hidden country appeared as image and contact, and only today my fingers tainted with tobacco bring back to me that moment when I stretched across you to slowly reclaim the keys of passage, to ravish the sweet space where your modesty preserved its final defenses, when with your mouth pressed into the pillow you sobbed in supplication, in deep acquiescence, your hair spread over the pillow. Later, you understood and you were no longer ashamed; you ceded to me the city of your most profound skin from many different horizons, after fabulous sieges, negotiations and battles. In this vague vanilla of tobacco that today taints my fingers opens the night of your first and final hesitation. I close my eyes and breathe in the past the fragrance of your most secret skin; I don't want to open them again to this present where I read and smoke and imagine I'm still alive.