THREE FEET OF DISTANCE

You and I lay on cushions

of your parents’ sailboat—

me on one side of the cockpit,

you on the other, three feet apart.

Waves in our ears, bug spray on our skin,

a collage of stars, ghostly clouds,

a moon spilling lunar light

over the packed sail. Your AP Chemistry

textbook propped by the galley stairs,

the bay rippling with shimmer.

What was that? What happened out there?

Moored in a cove, your mind drifted off

with the gulls as I stole glances

at your thin legs glowing

in moonlight, up to where your gray

sweat shorts ended and my heart began,

bailing blood to relieve

the drowning in my throat—

desire, certainly, but also

love, I thought—still think, sometimes…

Do you remember the way we got each other off

in the same briny bay?

We wandered to the far side of the sandbar,

over squishy land, hidden by shrubs

and sea grass, tossing innocence

like spilled salt over our shoulders.

We knelt in murky water, our fingers

turned to instruments of pleasure

as tepid waves rode in.

How gently your smile arrived, how suddenly

I came, submersion doing a number on my soul—

echoes of delight shouting through my senses

until my toes unwound and I mumbled,

“That’s good,” and you said, “now me—”

My wife of twenty years reminds me, firmly,

“We need more toilet paper.”

She’s right, of course,

but I’m still in that other moment

when you and I didn’t use any—

just water and our hands.

It sounds dirty, I know,

but I never felt guilty,

only nostalgia

for a time suspended on the horizon.

I always knew forever was a fantasy—

some things can’t be frozen.

That’s what I mean by nostalgia watching us.

Afterwards, back on the boat,

I felt gravity withdraw its buoyancy from my body,

for I was sinking,

and didn’t like myself, as you cherished

yourself—as you should—but we could

never be truly linked because of it.

That night, your parents asleep below us,

you crawled across the cushions

and lay beside me.

Maybe, yes, God, I wish

I had been who I was—

had said how much you meant,

how my cockiness was only fear,

my faith too small to see

the beauty I was given.

A great knife of fear

I held at my side,

ready to slaughter

anything that bloomed.

The toilet paper, for the record,

I retrieve from my car,

wondering why I love

too quietly, from a distance—

which feels like faith,

but isn’t.

But I have, on occasion, loved the right way:

raw, exposed, ridiculous—

the way I once said to my wife, through tears,

“Sometimes I want to disappear.”

And she closed the three feet

between us, wrapped her arms around me,

and held on—

nothing but faith between us.