Not until some
twenty
or
thirty minutes
after the car
drove
away—walking, by-
proxy,
Lucy, in the
slowly dissolving cool
of mid-
morning sunlight,
did my upper
right side―first begin
to goosepimple
and tingle a little,
to feel—not
on my
skin, but bubbling
shyly
up
from somewhere secret
and microscopic
deep inside it—
the weird,
quickening difference
between
the fact
of dumb love—
and the
very well-
formed and
allowable phonological
fictions which surround it—I mean,
between—
a purposive I
Love You (tightly
understood,
loosely
solicited) and an ape-ish
little one-
off rub
of a
tense upper
arm—
which definitely
wasn't.
