A taste of [The Vacant Room]

A tactile bliss of tactile sense materialized as she came into view. Our hunger, young, wanting and wearing was still there, still unfulfilled and healthy, a leaf that collapses by no sense of breeze. Against the wall of Cosi, reading Gordon Park's [Whispers of Intimate Things], she arrives in all black, shrouded in a babuska, the light appealing to her unfair triumph. In those words of Dante Alghieri, "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight-way was lost." She struck me as a mistress in a spy film, Hayworth from 1948's [Gilda] and I dreamed to take her to Kaus's Horcher, that "Place to go if your goal was seduction," or Goethe's Averbach Keller, the set encounter of Mephistopheles and Faust, where Mephisto's wine turned to fire, a sojourn through a pastime scattered Rhinelands, a cottage as a pied-a-terre, she, my hausfrau to a ephemeral home, the pseudo-dramatist, the tertiary tragidenne, on that day, Cassandra finally to light, the prologue to a fantasy, filleted of its nucleic pulse, julienned and scattered asunder to the four corners of the abyss. Her touch, even so modest, evenly distributed on my skin, even amongst the most harsh of contacts, is of a light petal brush, Parisienne wails and fugue sienna dew murmurs, the plentipotentiary enchantress, the deed to my heart was far sold, little lights dancing amongst the little saplings and the lake is starred, far transient scars with the brightening of a thousand cigarettes