What are you reading?

Brian Teare

On the Pleasure of the Text

Once I said "Yes" for an entire year.

And I kept walking toward him.

Crossing bright pavement waving in the heat, across the dark bar's floors studded

with the crunch of peanut shells, into the café where he waited over coffee, I kept walking

toward him.

"Yes," I said and made myself meet his stare.

"You're blushing," he said, blushing.

And it was like writing a sentence for the pleasure of handling grammar, parsing it

into clause and phrase, paying attention first to participles, how present, how active they

make us--flirting, touching--before prepositions lead us down, on, into, after….

I said "Yes" into his ear's parenthetical, put my tongue into it

(like so.

And I kept walking toward him, thinking this one in jeans, this one in a shirt that

snaps, this one in fatigues, this one in nothing, this one in chaps, this one holding a

pillow over his crotch.

Thinking to myself in the simplest terms: dark bar, small bed, fast taxi, rough

blanket, parked car, wet grass.

"Yes," I said, and--his lips against my cheek, his breath in my hair, his hand on

the back of my skull.

What I meant: I would love each detail as it was--lips, cheek, breath, hair, hand,

back, skull.

I meant I would love a list: against, in, on, of.

And it was like writing a sentence in order to undress grammar unsnapping the

commas so language will show more flesh and I can put my lips there and run my

hand down the buckling quick breath of its stomach each button on its fly a missing

period that means the sentence has nothing left except pleasure rising to the mouth that

will say and unsay it--

The breathlessness of the dash, how he always enters my grammar--

And I kept walking toward him.

This was in the city of dualist weather, of streets half sun half shadow, of days

caught between the only seasons: fog and light.

On Stanyan, at the edge of Golden Gate Park, I watched his profile flicker, as in:

passing clouds.

I watched his features change as if charged by a series of emotions too ephemeral

to isolate and name, not knowing that was how it would be in his room or my room, as if

the sky always had something to do with what passed as feeling between us.

"Yes," I said to the rogue beauty of his face, to his square-tipped fingers, to the

hair curling from his shirt, the curve and plane where his ass met thigh, the tuck of his

cock to the left, how he was not once clean-shaven.

Thinking to myself in the simplest terms: cheek, tooth, hair, beard, lips, ass, dick,

thighs.

Once I thought: opulent nipples.

I thought: round eyes of the ingénue.

Later his stubble still burned on my cheeks and thighs and ass

And after we'd unbuttoned each others' shirts, the moment his nipples touched

my skin an endless sentence arose rose, phrase upon phrase pressing a deeper pink

against his skin, sub-dermal color quick as breath and as rooted in a deep unreeling, the

spectrum between incarnadine and saffron shifting under pressure, red to red-pink to

pink-gold.

Intimate hush, the way thick cloth absorbs sound, so the room went quiet as his

cock entered my mouth.

His breath's quickening pianissimo and the graphic slap and suck of wet flesh

against wet flesh, and beneath that, a truck trembling cargo, men and women laughing as

they passed, a bicycle thrilling its bell, the crossing signal's shrill lilted cuck-oo/cuck-oo,

dog and dog and dog, then a child asking Doggy?

And I kept walking toward him.

City of dualist weather, parked car and lips, hair and hand, city of into, against

and of, city of rough blanket and this one holding a pillow over his crotch, rogue beauty,

fog and light, red to red-pink to pink-gold.

And I was thinking copula, that which can "fasten or fit together" both grammar

and men.

And I was thinking he preferred that which could be quickly fastened and

unfastened--he wasn't wearing pants and then he was, buttoning up his face in time to

his fly--that he would like a sentence within whose grammar ultimate meaning couldn't

be wholly caught.

I went down on him, "Nice" he sighed, the smell of pennies and chlorine, his

small moan and a tsuk at the back of my throat, one sound nested in the other--

engorged gore or--slant rhyme--awkward and cock--his like a horn, the word recurved.

From the beach below we watched the cliffs from which hang-gliders leapt into

air perilous enough to unsteady the gulls.

Holding his shoes while he hosed his feet, I was thinking I never knew what he

was thinking, that it was a cliché to think so and beside the point, but the thought was as

solid as the copy of The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara that one night sat on his

nightstand.

"Do you like Frank O'Hara?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "He's my favorite poet."

And then, as I lay face-down and spread-eagled, he secured first my wrists and

then my ankles in the leather straps.

And then--well, and then the then, the inevitable, ineluctable then.

As in how lubricious and lubricant share the same root, and how he kept the lube on

his nightstand also.

Was he thinking "Twin suns full of fur and noise/rolling softly up my belly

beddening on my chest"?

No, that was what I was thinking.

After the then, as he straddled my chest and fucked my face.

And yet I was also thinking he was always trying not to betray personal feeling--

either like or dislike--and so his thoughts played out their drama behind the screen his

face became in its studied dispassion.

He'd said he wanted to see his cum in my beard, and he'd said this the way some

people say they'd like someday to see the Eiffel Tower or Mt. Everest--as if it'd be an

accomplishment of a significant goal--and so I was flattered.

And I was thinking I could see the shadows of thought flicker and drum against

the underside of his face.

And it was like writing a sentence that has no modesty, how with his cock inside

my ass, a kind of vaulted space opened up in my pelvis--what it feels like to look up into

the high ceiling of a cathedral--and that it was a form of relief from the pressure of my

body constantly touching itself at all points, of the interior that is always full of its own

interiority, and that that is how being an I feels, which is why his cock was such a relief

and a pleasure: I was literally full of someone else.

Copula: cock, condom.

"Yes," I said and kept walking toward him.

Despite the similar trajectories of our rendezvous--the repetitions of

introductions, banter, rising attractions, segues into bedrooms and undress, the fucking

itself--there was always at least one detail, a variation in the sequence that marked him,

set him apart from himself.

He, for instance, who repeatedly wet his lips like one who longs for something

and anticipates the possibility of receiving it, but is uncertain when it will arrive, just the

briefest pink of his tongue sliding across his lips as though his mouth were an envelope

whose emptiness he could seal.

I was thinking in the simplest terms: birthmark, gap-tooth, accent, vernacular,

décor, bed-sheets, body odor, timbre of voice, how his shoulders filled the cloth of his

shirt.

And if I never knew what he was thinking, I always knew where he lived, his

phone number, his email address, his roommates' names, what kind of underwear he

preferred, what size condoms to buy, his favorite lube, if he was a good kisser, cut or

uncut, how much and what kind of foreplay, if he wanted to talk afterward, whether he

liked to shower together or alone, if he wanted an overnight, and, if yes, whether he'd

wanted to sleep touching, whether he'd tossed and thrown off the sheets, whether he'd

wanted to fuck again before leaving the house, what his mouth had tasted like in the

morning, how he'd liked his eggs and coffee.

In the city of waiting for the bus and tourists carrying travel mugs; of windows

displaying platinum wigs and dildos; of 24-hour gyms and restaurants serving crepes, of

bargain plastic flowers, mops and buckets; of impossible rents and summer construction;

of impasse, detour and road rage; of wireless technology and curbside recycling; of

couture and tie-dye and studied indifference to fashion; I knew, without fail, that he'd

want the lights on.

And I was wondering if he felt desire between us as I did a loosing of images and

phrases whose relationship was that they issued forth from a core that both structured

and was structured by affiliation with, attraction and proximity to, and (eventually)

memory--

as, forth, from, by, with, to--

of him: how grammar drew and draws us closer.

How desire's logic is profligate, all copula--this and then this and then that and

then--accretive, acquisitive, attentive, adding up to its own sum and nothing ever less

than whole.

And there was he who, after we'd walked in the park where he'd asked, "Why do

you think all these single men are in the arboretum at 3:30 on a Thursday?" untied and

removed my shoes as I sat on the edge of his bed.

The way he knelt not out of desire for pleasure, but out of a desire to be kind.

And I was thinking it was very beautiful in October in the arboretum where more

trees kept their leaves than lost them; I was thinking if you didn't have to work, you'd

want to be outside because it'd been cool but not cold during the days; it was a good

place to hear your own thinking, quiet and without much movement; you could read on

the warm thick sunny grass of the meadows without the threat and stench of dog shit.

And as he knelt, I could see that, beneath a sweet spare patch of thinning hair, his

scalp was turning pink from his having walked in the sun.

Him for whom I suddenly experienced longing of an unusual complexity and depth.

"Yes," I said, and meant : he was writing; he doesn't end; he occurs; he sustains;

he derives; he is adding up; he is was; he was made.

And I kept walking toward him--

And I was thinking that having said "Yes" had left me so much to remember that

it was like writing a sentence with perfect recall for taste, smell and texture, and that even

should I forget his name, there would be trace elements--tobacco and iron, coffee, salt;

patchouli, lavender, wisteria and leather; rough rope, muscled skin, lube and sweat-slick

cotton, soft beard and wet nipples' stiffening--sensory details lingering always in the

wake of grammar hinging shut, the sentence a door that clicks upon its lock.