Anecdote of Fools

The campus looks greener in the dark. Long lawns of grass and the old ivy’d buildings at the top of the hill. The floodlights glowing up from the foot of the oaks and the towering maples and the smoke wreaths in your hair. This would be the third night in a row we’ve come here. In a depression wet with dew and darkness, a miniature mystical forest of oaks, and maples and dogwoods, spread in clusters through the park. It is Spring and the air is scented sweet with dew and dogwood flowers, fresh, vital, aromatic aphrodisiacs. You ask me to brush the pine needles from your back. Stillness in the humid air. This has become our bench. We come here when neither of us can easily find sleep, and you text me, and I meet you, I meet you because of the sweaters you wear, two sizes too large for your thin little frame. What could be hiding in there? In the darkness that encroaches like walls from between the trees, giving no depth and only immediacy. Erasure of past and future, disclaimer from the vast expanse of stars we cannot see above: what else is hiding there? Two supple truths would be my best guess. I haven’t known you long. From a distance like a novel with 98% of it pages half-erased, a nimble beauty moving with quiet confidence through the library and down the halls. Speaking to no one, smoking cigarettes by yourself. Why the long face? Why the hidden dilemmas and the aura of existential doubt? What is it you were hiding I found myself so anxious to find? Here in the wet depression, comforted by night’s big blanket, you tell me the anecdote of fools. You tell me what you study in the daytime, you tell me of friends and the music you adore, you describe for me your bedroom. You show me the scar on your arm from when as a little girl you took a fall. And it must be a trick of the moonlight how clearly I can see your face, pock-marks on your forehead and little wrinkles beginning to show round the corners of your mouth. A picture forms, and I don’t like it at all. Your dreams are full of clobbering machinery. I don’t like you at all. I can feel the warmth of your body through your clothes, the soft touch of skin, your lips on my neck. The way your limbs are wrapped around me, the two of us entwined in the grass. I really wish you hadn’t taken to talking. You’ve ruined the night sky. I am distressed at how this has turned out. Your belly-button, I can say with confidence, would’ve been plenty deep for me.