Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 14:59:23 -0800
From: B Keeper <silvershimmer@earthlink.net>
Subject: A Loincloth for Jeremy

			 "A Loincloth for Jeremy"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman



Hi again Jeremy,
I watched you last night while you are sleeping. I wonder
if this is how I sleep, also. I watched you naked beside
me, your penis raising, your chest broadening in your
mind as it exhaled and inhaled, broadening, for in your
dreams, I've no doubt, you were thinking yourself a man.
I touched you with the very edge of my fingertips, as
though you were new music I was inventing. I stayed
awake all night watching you in moon glowing. And
growing in my mind, in my eyes that did not get gritty at
all, being awake all night.

I guess I said I love you a million times this last week,
never out loud of course, and I love you now that you are
sailing the friendly warm summer sky over the Sandias
Mountains where the trees are tall and our love was taller.
You were so delicate, so filled with bones of baby birds. I
was so shy and so scared. And you were beautiful. They
call New Mexico "The Land of Enchantment" and it is
that, magnificent place, even the air smells noble and fine
and of honor here. You were enchanting, and you held me
in this place of much history and much courage.

And you gave me courage as you gently took off my shirt,
and your mouth in that precise little bow of thought as
though you had never seen another boy's shoulders, then
chest, and then more, before me. You pretended and it is
fine, a pretending thing. I looked at you at five a.m. this
morning, moments before you woke up and we made love
again. Making love. Odd endeavor. Arms and legs and
penises and balls and faces and emotions, entangled and
dancing with each other,  and all the secret things.
Feathery feelings and missed opportunities, and love was
for us to 69 and love was for us to touch every part of
each other.

Our own private arroyos. Our own private caves and
mystical depths. Mescaline, which I tasted with you, this
week of our love, could never have made me higher or
happier than I was with just you, in the quaint Old Town
of our Young Love. I asked you please, and trembled, and
you pulled me to you and did not tremble. The
tremendous heat of your body. The overpowering veracity
of their surely being a loving kind God when I saw you
naked, and when you saw me naked and did not laugh or
make fun, but pulled me to you and kissed my closed eyes
and let me weep just a tiny bit.

I shall live in the fullness of this week. I shall stretch it
into moments more and next week and next year and the
year after, I will be here thinking of you. The boy on the
hike on the Sandias, who I glanced at askance in the tram,
and whose eyes would not let me turn away, here at my
foolish little job of reigning up and down the mountains
the trams, a summer job of little money, done last summer
too, free air and green trees and snow piles sometimes,
but this time there was you, this time there was Jeremy.
And I will not grow into the man I would have grown into
without you.

We loved behind the trees, away from the tourists and
their cameras hung round their necks and we loved in the
coldness of the air way up here and I felt you hard in your
jeans as I scrambled, free sudden most of shyness, to pull
them off and to see you naked, to see you rise and proud
as the most noble of history and heritage. Dear Jeremy, to
see your brown eyes again, to see you on the plane
winging its way back to your home, you enveloped in it, I
thank you for the consideration. I thank you for the
sweetness. I thank you for the sex and for its turning so
ardently into making love.

I never imagined a boy could suck my cock, I never
imagined anyone would. To feel your tongue there and
lathing it, and touching it and your mouth eating me as
though I was candy, as we lay naked and the sky was blue
and the air was cold and the summer week was hours and
a magic potion, an elixir in a sky world where forever
takes on an immediate meaning, a deeply personal and
importantly small wanderlust of meaning, like nets of love
thrown out all over the world. To capture sorrow. To
capture hurt. To bring all such things to us for us to touch
and linger with and fawn over and make better.

You have taught me how to laugh, I never used to laugh.
You have taught me how to be generous, when I never
was before. You have taught me delicacy and have treated
me like a flower that is a miracle and deserved more
tender soft grape peeling care than I had known before.
You have let me worship you and pray to you and make
your skin and bones thus mine as well. You have
fingerprinted me with you. You have played with my
naked body and walked your fingers up my hips and
paused at the arch above them and then slid your fingers
down me, sighing ahhhhhhhh, like they were mountain
climbers suddenly fallen into most excited crevice.

You have dreamt your dreams and you lay your head on
my chest and I held your cock and felt you sigh softly and
so happily. You might laugh at this as you read this letter
on the plane as I've asked you to, but I see you as a
strawberry Sundae on a hot summer day, in a cool soda
shop, even though you are dark haired and dark skinned,
to me you are a strawberry Sundae, and next semester you
are a high school senior, while I will be a junior, and you
will go out into the world and you will have your
fingerprints on me. But by then there will be more than
mine.

And the glass will turn cloudy, and the softness of the
grass on which we made grace with each other will be a
more and more distant confused memory. The sharpness
of the air here, the clarity of vision here, the meanings that
seem so precise they almost angle down in sheer cliff
stone dropping, and all of that will be a memory, and I did
not mean to wake you up. I wanted at five this morning to
kidnap you and take you to the mountains of the cave
dwellers, to kidnap you and carry you up bundled in love
the ladder, then push the ladder down and we would dwell
in the dark of love and the bright incandescence of it
forever more and no one, no one, would ever find us.

But you woke groggy and sleepy and stretchy and you
pulled me to you, and we are friends, no longer lovers,
polite, engaged in the disengagement of pulling away from
each, tasting distance further and further between us
again.  And to think, my god, you didn't want to come on
this vacation with your parents. What a fight you told me
you put up. Pouting on the plane, all the way here. The
horror if they had not forced you.

 I would never have begun life. I would never have ended
life. You are my god, Jeremy, the music of your name, the
giggle, your being Jewish, of never having encountered a
foreskin before, and how you loved to rub the sheathe up
and down, like a little kid with a tinker toy or Lincoln
logs. Oh you smiled at that, Jeremy and I got to see what
a circumcised cock is like. I loved it because it was
beautiful and because it was you. You touched your
mouth to my sheathe pulled all the way up and then you
moved it down with tongue and teeth and lips and we
giggled and it felt so tickly and happy and lovely....

You are lovely, Jeremy. This week you made me a boy
forever. This week I made you a man forever. And we will
never be together again. And that is my misfortune. That
is my sad conduit to giving love, and that is the making of
love for you and someone else, many someone else's. I
think you learned more from me, a mere novice, than I
meant you to, because I wanted to hold you back to me,
not give such clumsy lessons that your quick mind and
sharp wit can make bold and ballet like. But to love is to
give love. There is no other way. And if love given means
love perfected later on for someone else--it is of this I find
the saddest thing of good bye.

Fools use the word "closure" a lot. Closure of a business
deal I can see. But closure of anything human, anything
important, very good or very bad makes little sense; does
the mind somehow drop the unwanted memories and
feelings off the mountains, brush their hands and walk
away, never to remember?, or take a hair pin curve on
high sky roads and toss the memories and feelings down
into infinity and oblivion and cacti and brown ground and
multi hued flowers and bushes, there to lay broken and
unneeded and as if it never existed at all, even to itself?
How does the mind--the heart--be trained for such things.
I think I never want a mind, a heart like that.

I do not see how such a thing is possible. I guess you have
unwrapped your package by now. I asked you to do that
before you read the letter. To wait forty minutes after the
plane had taxied off the runway. I hope you enjoy the
present--a buckskin loincloth, I made it specially for you;
the beads in it of course are just colored glass, but I hope
when you stop laughing (stop it now, oh go ahead, I smile
thinking of you opening it and laughing that happy chirpy
giggle of yours) and when you get home, you will dress
your loins with it, be completely naked save for it, and
remember the warmth of me for a time. And if occurs to
you, I might like a photo of you in it, and you in you
too-----))))))

So for a time, you can note this week:

When an Indian boy of berry colored skin and dark eyes
and so much history and past and lore I dare not think I
will ever find myself in me, fell in love with a New York
boy named Jeremy, and the sky was huge and the Sandias
were beautiful and protective shoulders that huddled over
us and around us and blessed us and taught me how to
love and kiss and suck cock--I love saying that--so
naughty--so wondrous other worldly sounding--so fly
home Jeremy, fly home to Manhattan and autumn and the
start of a new school year and cold coming in bold and
blustery, there in the city of tall skyscrapers, and soon
very soon winter arrival--snow in Manhattan sounds truly
lovely--all those shoppers, and street corner Santas, and
cups of hot chocolate in your parents' brownstone--and
the Christmas Tree in Central Park--oh how I wish I could
be there with you to see Manhattan in winter, but I can't.
You will not allow it.

So for a time, if you please, remember a boy who fell from
the sky, on whom you one day took pity, under a sky and
clouds that looked like ice cream and marshmallows. I
fully believe if we could have touched that sky, we would
have seen it felt just like that, and if we could have eaten
that sky--well, then---

It was nice knowing you Jeremy. I will never forget you
for a second. I will love you and keep you young and I
will pray to you every night. It hurt so when you said to
me this morning that you would never come back here, as
you held me and rubbed your tender hands on my back,
down to my ass, because it was all so perfect and you
didn't want to take the chance, for either of us, on the
perfection being tarnished in any way. How it hurt. How it
always will. Your saying it. And the truth of it. Hey, I'm
the Indian around here. I'm the one with wise old sayings
and mystical incantations. But I know you were right. For
me as well as for you.

Fly home, Jeremy Potok, and remember for a little while,
Little Bird.

P.S. I guess now I can tell you--you so afraid of
commitments, you big tough man, you :)))))  I love you.

So there. Consider yourself loved. That wasn't so hard,
was it? My Jeremy. Enchantment seems to have gone
from my land as I write this as you sleep inches from me
as I watch you, and see poetry and longing and the past
glass and the future glass inside you and inside me and
wonder where either of us will ever wind up..

Go with God, Jeremy. Personal prayer, from me to you.

                                              the end



B Keeper
silvershimmer@earthlink.net