The perennial presence of you in me; the continuous vibration of those moments of luminous intimacy, the surprising way they're free to move in time loosely, erratically, irreverently, with rasp of wing-rustle, like how a perfect early Mourning Cloak moves in space. Or like how a Baltimore Checkerspot does, bright and brindled under the light of your lucky eyes that time in the grass above where the sweet and the salt waters mix.

I could mask this. I could pretend that my memories are of my young youth and of Tamara, whose school was across the piazza from mine in Baku and with whom I precociously eloped in the dory we built together over the course of two tense, rainy months; or that this first, indelible, irreducible love was wrought in me by sinewy Rula, the tough fifty-year-old Greek with the disarming serviceberry eyes who'd been a guerrilla leader during the civil war and whom I came to know in her exile in Tashkent through the sister of the tutor I'd engaged on barter-terms to help me with the pleasurably vexatious jargon of Το Χρονικόν του Μορέως.

I can wear a mask, I can put a mask aside. It's you, You are that love, you're the one I think of and dream of, the one my heart smiles at. My whole heart moves out of this body, embraces that one (yours); forgets its place; stumbles; is ecstatic.

I feel your wings moving, you're on my shirtsleeve; the air between your powdery scales and my pale blue squinty eyes is a live, sensitive tissue. Our presence is common. I feel you kissing me, me kissing you, in love, soft mouths, gently, again and again, continuously – even though I'm just here in the sunlight, sitting, and you're just there on my shirtsleeve.