Summer Rain

Copper flue. Middle-school honey. A lick of flame. Things that glow in the dark. Things that glow in my mind. Boyish breasts too. In a girl’s lacrosse-team locker room somewhere north of my medulla oblongata. An indecent daisy chain of floating aquarelle images. With this ring I thee wed. Wear me when you spray yourself with the warm rain of the bath (Ovid). May my excitement not get on your clothes.

Does every adolescent boy dream of stumbling into a girl’s locker room?

Globally, hundreds of species of coral engage in primordial rites of mass spawning tied to seasonally warming waters and the lunar cycle.“It’s like an underwater snowstorm,” said Emma L. Hickerson, a veteran diver and research coordinator at the Flower Garden Banks, a coral reef 100 miles off Texas in the Gulf of Mexico.

The bizarre details of coral reproduction. The bizarre coral-pink details of girls’ reproductive anatomy. Both tied to the lunar cycle. Trillions of eggs and sperm that swarm once a year nocturnally in the ocean and in my mind, leaving both awash in pink flotsam. Like floating petals from flowers that bloom in the night, under a streetlight, under a plaid skirt. In June, amid the sweet stink of lindens.

Sometimes I wish I could see around the corners of time. Because everything is there. Just not in the window frame. The copper flue in the dank locker room etc. The ocean of pink molecules swarming behind a smart blue lacrosse blazer slashed by a copper braid, or under a woolen skirt, dark as the sea, warm with the stink of linden trees in bloom. I know the trick is to realize that nothing is “in your head.” Your head is in everything and sometimes you wonder if you can bear the wonder. A glass buoy borne up by the mystery of girls in flower. And the scent becomes stronger as I decline into age. And sometimes I feel enveloped by one of their kind, on the street or on a subway platform, like a warm summer rain. Shouldering a bookbag. And I walk carefully so as not to break off branches of coral. The moon in the cavernous darkness of the subway station, which is tiled like a bathhouse (“86th Street Station”) and glimmers with aquarium light, is about to signal a momentous event. The subway doors slide open all at once, and excitement swarms the platform. Thank you Emma. Thank you moon. Thank you pink coral flower mystery. I feel drenched. I will peel you off, one day, as I peel off wet neoprene, along with all my other memories. After a bath in a girl. After a summer rain. Under a blanket of wet leaves, garden mould in my nostrils.

6/24/2016