Weeping Willow
by Michael Kilpatrick


Utter sadness is Sylvia’s voice and I cannot say a word; I just sit and stare; my eyes frozen.

How can I get close; I want to be closer. Already we were so close that the smell of the sweet heat of her body is over whelming. We are right here so that we touch; there is no space. 

We are right on top of each other but I want to be inside with her. Even when we started that was the way we felt for each other.

I recall those first times on the telephone when I did not know what to say. It was the way I had been all my life. So shy if a girl liked me she could not get two words out of me.  

Even though she was not present I would tremble as though I were in the presence of royalty. It was as though a gift I did not deserve was about to be transferred into my waiting hands and I as a peasant and did not deserve it. Even the black inanimate telephone became an instrument before which I bowed low in accepting a female voice coming across the wire.

How did I get over? How did I cross that bridge? How came the life of me going from cowboys to girls as was sung in song?  

I can say my first touching were kisses like some play thing, like some stolen thing, something boys and girls did in imitation.  

Beyond the touching came for me the bargain of the body as a commodity sold in the night. And there I tried to learn something of communication between man and woman when it opened before me I ran like some coward.

There was no running now. Here in the dark in the daylight under the willow in the heat of the summer it was cool.  

At the first discovering of this island it had been something to behold. It was in the sea of summer the entry way to a tropical south sea climate. It bore us away from all cares, all other things, all but us in our loving embrace weeping our love into one another as if this sheltering tree, this weeping willow, was our true place of birth.  

Cold and dark now, as we sit close, as we had come to be so close, and Sylvia said to me, sitting there, beneath that most gorgeous weeping willow that she had to go away because death was calling her and that was all she could say as tears flow copiously in our weeping.