Poem

It fits snugly and tidily into a plastic sandwich bag, with a slider closure.
A 3” x 5” photo, only slightly faded, in a deep cordovan colored simple wooden frame. Black would have been ominous. All wrong, as this is a picture of pure easy early light heavenly and laser intense feeling between two young beautiful people.
It is, of course, us.
As we were.

Everyone who sees the picture gets the same expression on their face: relaxation. Peaceful calm. As though looking at that image makes everything right with the world.

That’s what I had thought, too.
On second thought, maybe a black frame would tell a fuller story, a coda to that gentle graceful dance that we did in those years, the one that made people stop in their tracks and say things to me like, “You look to be in love.” Everyone wanted to be near us. Why not? Perhaps we were contagious and they would catch some. I luxuriated in my own happiness. It does happen.
It does happen. It happened to me. Until the dance became a slow motion dirge flailing and treading through muck and mire so thick and dense that I thought I would suffocate. Drown. And nearly did. Several times over many years, even though I am a good swimmer and hadn’t crossed any lanes or made any mistakes that I knew of.

It’s all so many many years ago now.
So now I put the photo into a plastic bag to take it to show my friend Manny. Proof that my stories were based in fact. Yes, they did happen. They HAD happened. They had happened to me. Here. Look. You’ll see.

He knew it the instant he looked at the photo. As does everyone else’s, his face changed. “Oh, my! What a picture. You’re stunning now, dear one, but this…. Radiant. Lucky man. Breathtaking.” He was right about that last: I did have my breath taken from me. Continuously and constantly for all the years we were together. He did take my breath away. And almost took the life out of me in the aftermath.

It’s a picture in a deep cordovan colored simple wooden frame that is now inside a plastic sandwich bag. The story associated with all this requires a
much larger container than the bag. One that is impervious to the universal solvent, which I don’t have nor do I know where to get it. I have never known where to get the stuff to make myself impervious.

I use the slider, put the bag in my purse, leave the house, and go to dinner and a movie with Manny. The movie was “Enough Said”, James Gandolfini’s last movie. A grown up love story, sort of. It’s nice to know that there might actually be such a thing. Maybe such a thing as that will happen to me. Maybe it already has. It’s hard to tell without a script.
And this isn’t a script.
It’s just a poem.