#53 – COLORS

Colors in the night and the scent of garlic and this womanly girl or girlie woman talking away across from me.

I am well oriented here in the still quite Italian part of Greenwich Village. This garden restaurant I first came to so long ago. Here in Manhattan where I have lived in so many neighborhoods. So many different lives, it now seems. So many lives in my times between other lives lived abroad. And this is such a fine picture, this smooth person with rippling hair, and what we used to call pneumatic body, and interested eyes in this romantically ramshackle place that is part of my past. This young woman so ripe she may be near the edge of overripe. All this like what I sought the first time I was in Rome and got to the artistically arranged ruins of the otherwise terrible Roman Forum.

As I look at her, I am thinking of other lives I have led. And thinking why not try another? The talk no worse than silly and she seems to have instinct beyond things that in the past eluded me.

And here now his garden, here now me happy, here now she pretty.

This sticky cheese on this still firm pasta is amazingly flavorful. I am in a time-out, and maybe she too, from this movement we have each joined, a time out from these hard matters we have been dealing with. This program where matricide and patricide and fratricide are not quite unthinkable.

The slippery crusty part of the cheese is the best. And I guess I do like anchovies.

And then I am thinking about all the barren times in strange but fine cities where I did not speak the language. And the sometimes lonelier times when I did.

And now the veal cutlets come. Cotoletta alla Milanese, or something like that. (Which makes me think of how I lost my virginity in a Roman brothel in that college year I romanticized the ruins of the Forum.)

As she talks – its about the bizarre mother again – I am thinking that the people I come from were not child fuckers, though with what I have been discovering this year even that should not be left out of the search for what happened.

I think this as she talks about something else, I am not sure what, I have lost her thread. I do not hear her but I see her and I breath her in just as I breath in the spices and the garlic, the smells now of sex.

I drift and dream of what I begin to hope that without too much rewriting it could be with Gillian. Here at this unstable garden restaurant table, my whole life flashing before me. Which is something that has been happening often recently in this charged time, my life flashing before me – and I cannot believe this has to do with the old saw about lives flashing by just at the point of death.