The sun has fallen behind the trees as my Gay Old Soulmate and I sit here on the deck in our little queer retreat cottage. If all goes well, we soon will leave behind the house we have lived in for twenty-seven years in the city we have lived in for thirty-two. We will move to a different house in a different town a few miles away from where we sit now.
Only an occasional bird call or distant dog’s bark breaks the silence. My soul has lived in unsettled quiet for some time now. Continue reading
I dream a dusty path
where cattle obliterate the grass,
making their routine pilgrimages
past a looming red barn
through weedy green pastures
to a creek’s still waters.
I never lived here,
a generation removed
from where I grew up
playing town-kid games,
seeing fields and pastures
only as a wilderness for imagination.
Fence posts mark a corner
where a barbed-wire crown dangles
half-wrapped back upon itself,
and dense hedge trees with their own barbs
grow lime-green apples
as rough as a farmer’s hands.
Distant from the farm
as from the gardens
that bracket my salvation,
I dream it as a sacred painting
an idealized icon
shining on my path.
I frame that glistening dream
now foreign to my life
and hang it as a blessing
to grace my older days,
like Jesus in the garden
or knocking at the door.
I pass the sign on the way to the upper swimming hole at the Rock River near Newfane, Vermont. The sign doesn’t say it, but optional should be in quotation marks. From this point on I will feel more exposed with clothes on than with them off.
So I strip as soon as my feet touch the gay beach. That only shifts my sense of exposure. Is it really possible to feel more naked in the midst of a crowd of naked men? In my youth we would have called this skinny dipping. Dipping, of course, hardly describes even the secondary purpose for our activity. Although I hold no expectation of a side trip into the woods with a handsome stranger, a palpable energy pervades this place no less than the fresh smell and sound of the water rushing over the rocks on its way to the West River. I feel the little arousals in me prompted by the bodies surrounding me. I compare my own skinny, aging, untanned body to theirs. Does every other gay man hold a gym membership and spend all his days lying naked in the sun? Few, if any, tan lines show. My dermatologist would be appalled even as I am enthralled.
Continue reading
I’ve been in this relationship nearly 30 years now. But I still check out the good looking men I see on my train ride and walk to the office each day. I fantasize about a little encounter. Would my Gay Old Soulmate object? Maybe he’d be thrilled to see me actually try something interesting and a little risky for a change.
I’m at the age where I could use a novel adventure. But being “at the age” is just the problem. Continue reading