Rock Harbor

The wind was high—it gave to your hair a lift in equal parts gradual, steep, disarming— I love a storm, and said so; by I have always loved better the wreckage after, I did not mean instead of, but a preference. To the air, an edge anyone would call arctic—isn't that why we left it nameless? To your face, a look I'd admired before in the bodies of those who seem not so much indifferent as made ignorant, or stunned as if by sudden luck, or else repentant and in payment, somehow, for what all price falls like an irrelevance, a stole, an expensive sail in a calm away from. Sex as a space available where neither loss nor regret figures—imagine that. Or not having, finally, to take anything away—in the form of photographs of the mostly ice that the harbor's water, the shore past that, the street after had become; or as words like those that came to me:green, kind of, lit almost, by as if from within in places, a spill but an arrested one, less force than the idea of it, block and edge like the chance for pattern, but spent now or only, from the very start, false —false and singing. The wind was high; it exaggerated what you were already, a man returning toward shelter he can't see yet, but believes just ahead exists, the sort of man for whom to doubt at all is treason. By not unfaithful, I understood I could mean both things: I'd do nothing I'd promised not to— Also, there is nothing I'll forget.