first kiss

After you showed me the hilltop monastery taken over first by the Nazis
who transformed the spacious chapel filled with gleaming Icons of Christ
and the saints into a horse stable of desecration, a few years’ later the
Soviets had their chance, turned it into a psychiatric hospital for dissidents
and their political re-calibration if not emotional castration, doing their best
to scrub all remaining traces of god and human holiness from the stone
walls,
and after lunch in the cozy hotel near a lake where I joked about the old
balding guy with a puny pony tail and his sour faced friend seated across
from our table being Russian gangsters, they’d driven up to the place in an
old gray Mercedes spewing smoke out the rear, you ordered a Chinese
dish with fish and rice --I had a delicious pancake with flavorful mushrooms
and gravy, a traditional meal you’d told me,
we drove a few miles across the city to your favorite cemetery where your
beloved uncle and your grandmother are buried, you parked near the
entrance and we sat silently at first in the front seat on that cold day in
November. I was scared to tell you how much I’d wanted to kiss you sitting
alone in the pews of the old church an hour or two before, but jet-lagged
and lonely I gathered courage somehow and began to speak about this
desire to touch you, to begin to bridge this distance between us. It didn’t go
well for some minutes as you seemed startled, your blue eyes receded
farther away and I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake by traveling all
these hours and miles for us to meet in your country.
You sat still, a little stunned, at the steering wheel as we watched people
with heavy coats, somber their eyes on the ground, walk out
of the cemetery on that cold day in November in ones and in twos. I don’t
know if I’d ever felt so lonely, so strange, almost homeless there in the
passenger seat of your Volvo.
How it then happened I still cannot exactly remember, but suddenly out of
this uncomfortable quiet your moist lips met mine and our tongues found
each other in a hunger so strong, this delicious urgency like a pleasurable
lightning strike, and there in front of the Kaunas cemetery on that gray day
in late Autumn our lives began a lovely bewildering dance of two persons
coming together at the boundary of living and dying, the known and the
unknown new, and the mystery of what yet we may become.