Could I Revive Within Me

                                   -AC Chapin
				    copyright 1995
				    sdragon@Glue.umd.edu

Once the cold has passed that point where it aches to breathe in, time
begins to change meaning.  A second is the length of time
you can think about something besides the dull stinging under the numbness
of fingers and toes.  A minute is the length of time you can stay in
the same position before muscles clenched against the cold begin to spasm.

     An hour is a meaningless concept;  you might as well measure the
length of a man's body in Astronomical Units as measure time
in the cold in hours.

     Her body shifted under his.  "Your turn to talk."  Her
voice was raw, she had been talking for hours now, which meant she had
been talking for longer than he could imagine.
     Shards of poetry scratched at his numbed mind, but soon
shattered, fell to words, then letters.  "I'll send you all my love
every day in a letter, sealed with a kiss."

     She bent her head up and kissed him, her lips terribly rough against
his.  "Better words.  Better words."  her breath seemed hot
in his mouth.
     "In Xanadu--"

     "No.  Not Coleridge."  She kissed his cold cheek with
cold lips.  Her eyes were closed.  "Tell me a story."

     He couldn't remember a single one.  "There once...  there once...
In the rooms the women come and go, talking of
Michelangelo."  The words came from his pinched throat coarsened,
but on-key.

     "Eliot.  Prufrock... but I didn't know there was music."

     "I just... I made it up."
     "Sing the rest."

     But all he could remember was, "I have heard the mermaids singing
each to each.  I do not think they will sing to me." 
     She shifted under him again, kissed his mouth again, 
gently.  "Tell me about the warmest place you've ever been."

     "I had a room in Calumet, last year.  It was summer, and I
was chasing a murderer.  I couldn't sleep, it was so hot, and
they didn't have any airconditioning."
     "If we were there, I could touch you."

     Nervously, he kissed her.  Her teeth were cold and smooth as porcelain.
When he shifted his body he felt the rub of her
against him, even through all the layers.  "Victoria."
     She began saying her poem again then, slowly, mindlessly. 
She moved so gently.  When he kissed her again, the words of the
poem went into his mouth.
     The poem went on and on, arrythmic, a subtle sound to move
in, to be moved against in.  
     He never knew what she felt, through so many layers, though
she shuddered once, deeply, beneath him.  His own eyes clouded,
darkened terrifyingly, and for an awful second a wave of heat
passed over him and sweat stood out on his brow.  Then he was
limp, and he echoed the empty words of the poem into her ear,
sighing.
     It was a long time before he started thinking in hours
again, and even years later, in another lover's arms, he secretly measured
time in the length of poems.

"Could I Revive Within Me" copyright 1996 AC Chapin sdragon@Glue.umd.edu

Dedicated with greatest gratitude to Sharon Pearson and Marie Leonard,
both of whom sent to me copies of "Victoria's Secret" after
I wrote this.