VERSTORY

(These poems have all been posted elsewhere on the internet, years ago, but I decided to string some together to partly tell a story.)

I had dated Jackie David perhaps a half-dozen times before we went dancing. I had found her more and more attractive each time, but had gone slow with her in the hope of building something solid in the way of a relationship – since she seemed to have more substance than any woman I had dated for some time.

But the night that we danced I found her breathtakingly beautiful, and I found myself thinking about her after we said goodnight. I put my thoughts into words, partly to get them out of my head. We danced on Friday; I wrote what is below on Saturday morning and printed it out.

. For a Dancing Lady

I love the way you move so gracefully,
As if you had no weight upon your feet.
That liquid motion, beautiful to see
Is only one of all the ways you’re sweet.
Your raven arm-length silken flowing hair
And how it moves about you as you walk,
The perfect skin you show with your arms bare,
The spritely and insightful way you talk…

I’d like to know, however, how you’d be
Held in a horizontal dance with me.
Do you as smoothly move in passion’s throes?
Does grace stay on beyond the bedroom door?
Oh, lovely vision of the dancing floor,
I think you’d make a perfect boudoir rose.

Jackie met me at my apartment on Saturday evening, and found the page which I had printed out. I had no idea that I had left it in plain sight, but Jackie read it and put it in her purse. She thought about it on our date that night, and much more so afterwards.

On Sunday morning, I received an e-mail message from Jackie.

Thinking About You

Your kisses make me dream too much, you know,
And worse, it’s while I lie in bed awake.
I think about the way you hold me close
And how you laugh, and how you talk to me.
And that is why I want to take things slow,
Slow and prudentially, for both our sake.
I fear we’ll suffer from an overdose
Of passion’s drugs without formality.

The love for you that’s growing in my breast —
If that is what it is — is much too strong
For such a vessel as I seem to be.
I want to ponder ev’ry step now, lest
We find that all this rightness is all wrong.
Yet still, each night I wish you were with me…

I tried to call her when I read that, but she was not answering her telephone. Clearly, this was something that Jackie was willing to write down but not to say to me directly. That was evidently a step too far for her. But that night there was another message from her:

For a Very Nice Man

I like the way you hold me in your arms,
The way you kiss my lips and brow and cheeks,
The peace I feel reclining on your chest,
The strokes that make me fall halfway to sleep.
I love the way your hands feel on my back,
Massaging muscles up and down my spine,
The way you look so deep into my eyes,
And how you touch me underneath my breasts.

We haven’t gone as far as you might like,
Or as I sometimes wish that we had done.
I’m not sure what I want to do or when;
I worry that we’ll do things to regret.
But this I want to tell you fervently:
You tempt me.