Tale of Seduction
San Francisco, two women, and a homeless poet.
The cool evening air swept across his face as the kiss was over. Goodnight, she said. Then, as she turned away, walking up the steps to her apartment. He swooned; something flew out of him. He called to her, she turned. He followed up the steps, kissed her longer, holding her close. They stopped kissing. She looked at him, smiled, fingers touching his mouth, and kissed him back.
They said nothing at all.
Dizzy, his thoughts tumbling and falling, he can still sense the world, now made up of scent, taste, and touch, not of words. Of warmth, mystery, and excitement. It was done. They had reached a level of intimacy that was warm, beautiful, and immediate.
A London poet, homeless in San Francisco, had not bothered to scrawl each memory on a cloud or curb stone. He wrote as he traveled, a serenade for those who got him through a drunken night; a sonata for those faces that time erases but does not forget. A double wind concerto for the wind itself, blowing him anywhere.
He dropped poems into the laps of strangers, even laps he knew. Made music, using notes, and half notes, lessons learned, prizes earned, not always given. There were paths he trod, long forgotten, walking to town and back, to far shore, near field, on yellow days, to the corner shop the in Tenderloin, below Nob Hill.
Bodies lying, drug addicts flying, he never knew the world was dying. This need in San Francisco, it’s an infected wound, still not healed. It will take more than poems, wine, or magic. They lay wrapped under cardboard blankets, who will bring their smiles when the coffee starts its perking. Tenderloin Haight, the poet’s open sandwich, impossible to digest.
On Filmore Street, no woman wants the hidden hand of anything to be her pilot. She should set out on some journeys with only maps of her own choosing; no compass would have led her to befriend a poet drinking Cinzano. She was joyful and erotic, though children, she said, had cooled love’s ardor.
The poet did what he did, what he wanted to do, and had never stopped doing. The joyful woman paid for the room, lying there, sexy, wet, panting to be taken, eyes flashing with want as he held her stare, pushing his buttocks in close, her tongue entwining with his, and he knew it was close, knew… knew… knew….and then her head fell backward, her breasts heaved, the flood came, sensations sweeping over her, through her, and everything of loneliness was lost, subsiding, and her eyes stayed closed for a moment. When they opened, the poet was smiling down.
She wrapped herself, cried, and ran for the door. The poet didn’t chase her. It’s an ancient comedy played in cities all around the world. Reality is a thorny thing. The poet pays affection, is purified by food and drink, and delights in women’s fatal qualities.
The poet is measured, reinvented, unlocked of mind in a non-suspecting world.
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