I COULDN'T SET YOU FREE

20. I COULDN'T SET YOU FREE (Yukio Mishima and me):

And it was never like I had a choice anyway : nightlight broadlight streetlight camping out you rolled the dice over my fading solace and I remember we spoke pretty much of nothing at all you balancing as you could something on your head as I watched and it was a pile of books or something and I thought of your African curls and how well you looked just then of any of this pictures I used to see of African women walking great distances with jugs on their head balanced and steady or the other pictures I'd seen and even that guy in Plainfield walking the streets with a pile of laundry in a big sack set steady atop his head or their heads and whatever and I knew you were tribal I knew you'd come from someplace else and far off distant and you just kept walking past and showing me and my eyes were locked and I couldn't set you free even had I wished to wanted to cared enough to to do so : it was all like a fine country caper and up on some knoll or fading bluff somewhere over the carnivorous sea - eating men eating dreams eating sailors eating me - and then we both took candles to the dark and went up the thin staircase to the top that small narrow room with but one crooked window overlooking the water and as we watched nothing moved nothing outside except the black the black of you and the black of me pounding rough and hard like surf like something we served on a platter as the candles wore down and turned oily and knotted into sad lumps and you talked you talked going on about the faded American dreams of a busted revolution and a society sick and rotten and how all you wanted was a knife to go home with but you knew you could never return and you said 'if my land was like my country that would be one thing but they are both so very different and I have nowhere to call now home and I only have you to love me once and a million times more can you will you and then I'll stay if I only know this' and I said I understood but it meant nothing because I didn't understand the longing and I had none never did never had anything to wish for never 'pined' for those pines of Rome and I wasn't no Ceasar and so didn't care 'my Rome to your Carthage' was the joke of our day and we settled back and then and listened to the sounds that ocean waves and water made and too the sounds of love were heard in the never-fading air until you stayed no more and then you were gone and I was left holding nothing at all (like that sailor who fell from grace with the sea).