About those bruises

By the way, Marie also answered my question about why, exactly, she was so glad to have bruises from me. It's not nearly as intriguing or provocative an explanation as the S&M theory I was advancing, but it makes a lot of sober sense.

Mm. Marking. S&M, either power or pain. I don't really think that's it, or not a strong component of my liking to be marked, just because I remember girls proudly displaying hickeys being absolutely ubiquitous in my junior high, and any version of S&M is a more specialized taste. 

But I remember it being ubiquitous among girls who were necking (or possibly more) in junior high, but now that I'm thinking of it the tendency grew less pronounced as we all matured. So now that I'm thinking of it in this way, it seems more that displaying hickeys is a way of flaunting, past any possibility of denying, that one has been strongly desired. And the tendency to want/need to flaunt the proof perhaps might diminish over time, as one gets accustomed to the idea that yes, one is strongly sexually desired.

In which case, of course, it would make sense that I, after a twenty year span of thinking myself sexless and undesirable, should react like a silly schoolgirl: "Look, look! Proof that he wants me! Look!" And that I like to see marks on myself, so long as they don't hurt (and they don't).

OK, fine. I'll drop the theory for now. We can see how it goes ....
  

A revised "Exchange"

Another of my old poems that I recently sent Marie was "Exchange". I explained what I remembered of the background to it (not that much any more) and she had several things to say.

One was that if she and I had married way back in college, I could easily have written this about her. Also that if you put this beside a poem she did write in college -- all about how she couldn't talk to me or tell me anything about how she felt about me -- you see DISASTER written all over the relationship. So it's no wonder it never worked back then ... we both had a shitload of growing up to do first.

And then, a day later -- as she was on her way to visit me for the trip I just described yesterday -- she sent me an extension. An updated and slightly revised version, as follows:


Exchange

My love, he speaks me wisdom,
thought with keen-eyed clarity.
My love, he sings me verses
of immortal poetry.
His kiss bursts into passion
and the flames to heaven leap.
But then he slips to silence,
and the silence cuts me deep.

His wisdom finds me grateful –
such a mind with such a heart!
His songs I meet with rhyming,
my small baby steps at art.
From his passion I take fire,
as to burn myself away.
But silence turns me sullen,
and I cruelly silent stay.

My love may speak me wisdom,
but he says I do the same.
My love may sing me verses,
but we each can start that game.
Wrestling soul and body,
we ascend to passion's peak --
so when either one goes silent,
may I be the first to speak. 


What can I say? Very flattering ....
   

Visit with bruises?

Marie was just here for two nights -- way too short, except that she doesn't have any more vacation than that from work right now and I had tickets to a concert for Tuesday night. Oh, ... and also I'd visited her for four nights last week, en route to another business trip. And then, too, we'd gone out to a concert.

I haven't kept a running tally of our visits, the way I did nearly ten years ago when I started dating D. Nor really of our conversations, though there's still the chance that I might post all our e-mails on-line here. Some day. When I get around to it. Mañana.

Meanwhile we continue to talk about everything. This time I heard about one of her aunts who spent the thirty years in between her first and second husbands firmly decrying the institution of monogamy. This is a different aunt from the one who broke one of the beds at the family's vacation retreat because of some very energetic fucking. And of course her mother spent years addicted to both booze and sex. I suggested to Marie that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible to detect a certain thread of ... high energy in the women of her family. True, it has only been recently that Marie herself has had much of a sex life (courtesy of yours truly), but I added that she wouldn't have suffered so much from fighting against her own sexual nature if that nature hadn't been very strong to begin with.

I've also continued to send her some of my old poetry. She has been astonishingly good about reading love poems I wrote for D, though as often as not she has followed up with questions: Wait, you said this and that about your relationship with D -- how does this fit in at all? Anyway, just before her flight down I had sent her "Call me".

The discussion here was interesting. Did I really think D was two-timing me? Hard to say. We talked about it a lot as a joke, but D was in her late 50's and women that age don't get a lot of offers. (On the other hand if anybody that age would get an offer, it would have been D!) And I added that (as I note in the post itself) the poem doesn't describe exactly what happened ... although honestly I no longer remember what really happened, only what I wrote. And finally I remarked, as a stylistic point, that I wished I had found a way to put the word true in the first line of the third stanza, because having true or truth repeated in every single line would have been a nice touch.

That she could help me with. This morning, while she was waiting for her plane back home, Marie e-mailed me this update:
 

"Tomorrow call my phone just after six.
I'm on the road – alone an hour or two.
They say that phones and driving shouldn't mix,
But I am famished for a chance to talk with you."

And so I called, a bit past six o'clock.
I heard a rustle, voices, then a hush.
"My darling, are you free now? Can you talk?"
"I'm not," she said, and hung up in a rush.

It's true she'll send me e-mail with the dawn,
Assuring me how true I'll find her heart.
She'll tell me, "Truly this is what went on."
If only Truth for her weren't such an art!

And yet I'll love her every bit as well,
No matter where she was, or what she'll tell.


The one other thing that caught my attention this trip was ... well, a turn in our ongoing discussion of sex. Marie had remarked that for years her intensest sexual fantasies had to do with a man drugging a woman to make her lose all her inhibitions, and then forcing her to feel outrageous ecstasy. And I had remarked that, oddly enough, this is how our own fucking usually goes. I don't have to drug her, it's true. But since I almost never get hard any more, or not for long, I spend most of our fucking in the coordinated use of my hands and mouth. This means that I can keep going more or less as long as I want to ... and what I usually want is to push her into coming over and over and over again. Sometimes I'll pause and let her catch her breath, but only as a momentary interlude before starting again ... and again and again. So am I actually acting out her darkest fantasies? And how far am I coercing her? (In fairness she is always joyful, both during and after. So it's hardly against her will! Still, the timing is all mine and not hers.)

Then this afternoon, after she got home, she sent me a text that made me think of the same topic all over again.

rough draft

Marie was here to visit a little while ago, and during the whole visit I had this nagging cough that would not go away and sometimes got frighteningly severe. Today she sent me this.

the coughing fit shakes you
then you sit, doubled over
breathing painfully,
shallowly.
trying to stop the next spasm

the coughing fit shakes you
then you crouch, doubled over
breathing carefully,
shallowly,
braced for more pain

the coughing fit shakes you
then you lie, curling double
mouth open
silent
frightened to breathe