because falling in love is really falling, there is the presicpice and there is the sea, and there is the strenghth of the sun, and that is the wind in your hair, and there goes the moment as precious and just as precocious as a..., and all the images that I can't record, like the music singing in the wires and the sailing hawks at eye level, and the sweet clover pelts of the hills melting in the distance, and the space where hands meet over the gear shift and the flash riccochets off the dashboard, just an early spring spent in the front seat, just a bit of razor burn, just some anticipated wildlife, just some breathlessness, and some bright ocean blue, just a minute between oysters and desultory service,just the minutes between him undone between my sheets and the heat I radiate.

And somewhere before the middle I remembered to quit smoking, just after tennis but before we had dinner last, I am heading into the seventy-second hour and I am this close to chewing on the carpet. With the Engineer at arm's lenghth, I can simply unfurl, and roll to consume - he has asked me kindly to stop humping his leg, but it is nothing I can help in his proximity, it's reflexive, it's want and hunger and desire and not stopping even when it's way past sleep, it's some deep seated need, it's the tide coming in, and the moon at bay, it's every last thing I would have told the engineer if I was only a little bit braver and a little less cowardly, if I were only a lot more tidal and less discriminating, but who ever said that the tides were the great arbiters of taste.

And whoever said that anybody else was ever interested in the banalities of falling, I am reluctant to speak of my good tidings, because they are my own, my own from the fartheset corner of his bed, my own for the dreams I miss at the expense of his breathing, and I've got no long list of complaints, I only want him curled into the right side of the bed, and I only want to him to catch his breath, and if I am really, really lucky he will reach out and pull me in, despite my 1000 degree ambient temperature, and I will fall asleep falling in love, fingers and toes as foot soldiers, territories and truces, brokered territories and secret spots on maps, the place that once belonged to d and I in the late afternoon and is now owned by the lichen an army of righteous bunnies, all that I was is swirling in the tides, all that I am is breeching the surf.