The Condom Tree

Pleasure must slip

right through memory’s barbed wire,

because sex makes lost things reappear.

This afternoon when I shut my eyes

beneath his body’s heavy braille,

I fell through the rosy darkness

all the way back to my tenth year,

the year of the secret

place by the river,

where the old dam spilled

long ropes of water and the froth

chafed the small stones smooth.

I looked up and there it was,

a young maple

still raw in early spring,

and drooping pale

from every reachable branch

dozens of latex blooms.

I knew what they were,

that the older kids

had hung them there,

but the tree – was it beautiful,

caught in that dirty floral light,

or was it an ugly thing?

Beautiful first, and ugly afterward,

when I saw close up

the shrivelled human skins?

That must be right,

though in the remembering

its value has been changed again,

and now that flowering

dapples the two of us

with its tendered shadows,

dapples the rumpled bed as it slips

out of the damp present

into our separate pasts.

-- Chase Twichell, from Perdido