Gifts Giveth...

I have come to realize that the great challenge of my life with women is two-fold:
First: I almost always know, at that critical moment, exactly what to say.
Second: I almost always, despite myself, say it.

Man ~ Woman ~ Moment

The man kissed her stomach, flat, ivory, downy. He understood it, in that space that exists without words, to be the thing which caused gods to launch flotillas against their cosmic enemies for the loss of it. He felt the woman’s hand on the back of his head as she lay there, as if to divert him from moving farther down. Damn the protests of body image you’ve been fed, girl, he thought, I intend to worship at the temple. We have already lit the incense, consecrated this warm woolen space with the gasps borne of the first blush of our nakedness, our hungry kisses and bites meant to sanctify or devour. He caught her eyes, tried to say without saying it: You could sooner stop me now than you could a river flowing from a mountain with the momentum of winter’s melting snow behind it.

The man let his beard graze those prickly-soft small hairs, two or three days grown back in. Kissing gently on either thigh, moving to kneel astride her, reaching for a long slow fading touch just short of a tickle, all the way down her legs, knowing without seeing it that she had painted her toenails Light Rose Pink, just for him. The musk of her, the low rolling fog smoke of the incense, the lilting piano music, and there he sat, face-to-face with her, her center, her inscrutable mystery, old when the Pharaohs reigned. A finger gently inserted, probing softly, cautiously twisted and crooked until he hit that spot, lingered there, and they both smiled, deep sensual satisfaction, ancient and proud. What right, he thought, did he have to share in this ancestry, a path to immortal bliss paved smooth for him, the undeserving acolyte, by his long-suffering forebears?

No, disconnect, the man told himself. This was as primitive as the first chisel on the first stone wall. Smell her, drink her in, drink her, be that thing that lurks behind the eyes in a primeval part of the cerebral cortex, in the reptilian brain, be that whorl of teeth and need and essence. Temper it with your human-ness, hold her, pull her through the veil with you for these few seconds and let your brains explode together to become the blasted rock that circles Saturn in rings, and never ask why. Never ask why, just be.