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Page 12.
 She reached out and absently stroked his hair. “You’ll have your success,” she said encouragingly. He saw, in her look, a habit of being (in his view) associated with intelligent and aggressive but weak men. He stood back, proudly, when he saw men like he imagined her husband probably was. He was a rebel and did not play the game, so he defeated himself often, but it was again that poetic triumph. Such men were shadows of conformity; weak in their consuming need for recognition, the adult form of stupid, juvenile peer pressure. Such powerful arrogant and sweaty men filled her world. He could tell. He radiated his refusal to be like them—now or ever.
“I don’t need success!” he protested, rising. Blather poured forth, before he could restrain himself. She did something to him. “I don’t care about recognition. All I want to do is write poetry. I want to mow lawns, conquer grass—and find someone like you to adore.”
Upon this confession she regarded him with confusion and admiration.
I would write poetry about you in adoration. Light candles before you if I ever went to church.
They bent their faces close together, and their lips brushed. It was the electric connection they both needed at that moment. It was the stray lightning bolt out of nowhere on a darkly cloudy, hot summer wheat field.
He pulled away breathlessly from her moist, cool, soft lips. The directioning of her chiseled knees was in disarray. One pointed to him, the other to the slatted narrow basement window. He noted the cool pliancy of a pale inner thigh, momentarily exposed.
He felt stunned, and she looked shocked.
She reached out to touch his hair, but her hand froze. Then she caught herself. What had she done? She shoved herself violently erect with both hands on the armrests, and fled from that undersea cavern.
Poor love, he thought, what was I thinking? His heart still beat warmly for her, halfway up his throat.
He wiped his hands on a paper towel, thinking that it would be decent to forget all about her. The right thing to do. He slowly turn to rejoin and restart his blue smoking mower in the soaking green light outside.
There would be much poetry flowing from him that evening on the keyboard. Golden verse, like the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew’s precious atoms of the day, gleaming in the darkness before the dark tide of chaos and civil war and regicide in the early 1600s. Marc had indeed studied, and studied well. His emotionally and mentally composed études poured richly shaped from a well-instructed klavier of all the best schools, ranging from Homer and Ovid, Catullus and Petrarch, to Rimbaud and Verlaine and, oh, all the best in the Ouest.
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