the lost generation

the beginning of “We Didn’t” by Stuart Dybek

We did it in front of the mirror
And in the light. We did it in darkness,
In water, and in the high grass.

Yehuda Amichai, “We Did It”

We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in darkness. We didn’t in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn’t in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you’d slept in as a child, or in the backseat of your father’s rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent’s meat market. We didn’t in your mother’s Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a bearded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs.

At the end of our lover’s lane — a side street of abandoned factories — where I perfected the pinch that springs open a bra; behind the lilac bushes in Marquette Park, where you first touched me through my jeans and your nipples, swollen against transparent cotton, seemed the shade of lilacs; in the balcony of the now defunct Clark Theater, where I wiped popcorn salt from my palms and slid them up your thighs and you whispered, “I feel like Doris Day is watching us,” we didn’t.

How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy.

Posted 3 weeks ago — 2 notes