n the afternoon at the jazz festival in Vienne, it was the sudden recognition of America on your tongue that made me introduce myself. We sat and talked about Thelonius Monk, your nose pink from the morning when you walked through acres of cemetary, the sheer volume of headstones losing all meaning. You told me: at sunrise they were rows of teeth, a shark's mouth opening slowly as the sun yawned over the hill.

"Too many good people die," you said, no sudden revelation. Today the sky was such a clear blue, a deep basin of cool water that remains unrippled, forgotten and far away. The fields filled with the ocher of sunflowers, a harsh glare that rippled through the low hills like the feel of your voice, deep and rumbling in my chest. It was as if you tried to consume an unuttered sorrow, some word or phrase that got stuck, never got said, and now your voice must speak around it, this thick, sad thing in your throat.

Now, in the intimacy of a blue darkess, two hours passed the sunset we are sitting, you and I, the backs of legs stuck to plastic lawn chairs, watching the fireflies on the Rh™ne. Lightening bugs, you insist, telling some story of your childhood that already sounds familiar. As you are talking, each thought is punctuated by a brief brilliance, your cigarette's end illuminating your face. Your eyes half-shut, your hair slicked back, the arrowheads of your cheekbones slice the air as you speak again. What you say heaves over me like the tide. At the trough of each wave of speech a small muteness, a careful breath between us lingers. To see the sharp scissors of your speech bleed the air marroon with your breath, ripe from dinner and smoke and wine--this moment is a sour cherry, acerbic, too much to swallow, but too precious to evict. Tomorrow we will leave this place to find our lives intact, barely nicked, walking wounded.

But at this moment I am still, my whole body an ear the better to hear you with. A way off thunder rumbles, and though we can see no lightening, I say, "Looks like rain." And like an accusation, you are reticent. Left in the gulf of your silence, I stumble, knowing nothing.

Just as the first drops of rain begin weighing down the grass around us, this evening of rapt attention suddenly closes. Soon we will run for cover, and join the world again. I resign myself to this; it is enough. But you lean forward ever so slightly, a gesture of impatience balanced on your fingertips. Measuring the fewer inches between us, I wonder a way to snatch a fistful of your shirt and stop all this. How I could whisper in your ear, saying something, nothing, just to brush the ridges of that brown shell softly with my lips. I could ask you something that would require a long, drawn out explanation just to smell the warm smokiness of your breath this close to me. But this is all too real, too sudden, too late. With no sun to blind me, no sea to drown out the throbbing of my heart, it seems I can do nothing but pry myself from this plastic chair, the feel of this removal like the opening of harm.