It was a culminating summer, somehow,
the second one after the end of my first
marriage and just prior to wooing my
second (and current) wife (for these 11 years).

My neo-bachelorhood still fit strangely;
I was sober -- well, dry -- but wanting
more than O’Douls watching bands in
old bars I once had vowed never to haunt again,
unable to muster much aggression in
chasing women without the booze.

I was 38 and working in a drone
of sized-down corporate overwork,
too fevered from rapidly-changing
technology and profit margins that
kept shrinking no matter what the
corporate office demanded, no
matter what measures the directors
took to slash the ranks
and maul up production.

I fought my drowning there
as best I could. Nights I studied large
and early mornings I wrote poems
loving and hating academia at once;
I wanted to be jazzy, blue and hep,
something noirishly late 20th-century,
fallen in the ways of love and civ,
lonely in the night with forged
wings that were yet fully articulated,
silver blue and dripping wet.

After work I exercised like a madman
at the Y, working off my stress in the sort
of thrash only men in their early
middle age needed to display,
I guess desperate to prove how much
youth remained in our fading bodies.

Three days a week at 5:30 p.m.
I faithfully attended the step aerobics
class taught by Laura that fitness Nazi,
whirling and kicking and leaping
from three piled plastic steps
while she barked out commands
above the howl of Muscle Mixes
on the booming sound system.

The thrash and fling and sweat
of it was immense, especially in summer,
the building’s a/c nominal at best,
the blonde-floored room become
a kiln over which we swirled
our dervish exercise.

Outside and in during July
it was always 98 degrees
ripping up a gale of storm
and sweat; I usually changed out
of my first t-shirt half-way through
class, plopping it wetly down
next to my pack  at the back wall
and throwing on another.
(Always sleeveless, and sometimes
the T was so minimal  that my
nipples poked round the straps.)

And then I’d turn and try to slow
my breaths, readying to hurry
back into the fray where it was
step, step, turn, turn,
leap over, turn, leap back.

A young woman in the rear
row always smiled as I passed by
headed from or to my step
at the front, somewhat heavy,
dark-haired doe eyes and
with large breasts mounding
up a grey leotard darkened all
around with sweat. On my turns
I’d always look back to catch those
breasts heaving this way then that
in the courses of the class,
her long auburn hair flying about
a face so serious.

Over weeks that summer our
steps got closer -- both us heading
toward the middle row -- and we’d
chat a couple minutes before and after
class. Nothing much, she was much younger,
freshly graduated from her massage
therapy school, her steady boyfriend
moved over from Daytona with her
and living in an apartment not far
from my own.

Massage sounded good to me -- I
had years of stress and soreness
built up in my back and neck --
so I had a few sessions with her
in her apartment, always late
afternoon when her boyfriend was
at work. I’d lay naked  face down
on her table with a blue sheet’s cool
cotton over me, some spacey
New Age synth or guitar on
a CD player softly blending
with the scent of sandlewood incense.

How good her hands felt on my
neck and shoulders, working deep
into those historic knots, releasing pent
rages and griefs from the laddered
precincts of my spine. Face down
I let go the endless miasmas of
corporate work, deadlines I
would never quite make which
always piled higher the next day;

Let go too the black months
that followed my divorce, her
strong hands squeezing out
the sound of my wife’s voice
raging at me for my greater
love of books, drawing out
the toxinned guilt of my
my stepdaughter’s eyes

the day I carried the last box
out of that emptying house. The
gall was rich and perplex
where the hurt was worst:
I knew my stepdaughter
was 17 and growing up fast,
but the little girl in her could
still leap up and out

and that day I saw the 9 year old
I had told I’d married for all life,
her face raw from all the
abandoning daddies
wondering how much to trust
this thing called hope.

And then, as that woman’s hands
worked my cabled thighs calves
and feet, I felt the physic go
deeper than her hands dared:
I imagined them reaching higher
to work the blue root of my hurt,
that awful wronged libido I had,
oddly, for books and pussy:

With the next summer storm
rumbling in the curtained soft
gauze of that room I imagined
one of those strong soft hands
reaching up under the sheet to knead
my asscheeks, grazing my balls,
pausing only a second before
cupping them and slowly squeezing
the aqua vitae from its hive,
kneading and pulling at my
honey bells, stirring me to life.

The hand would withdraw and
I’d wonder if that was all; then
I imagined a voice whisper turn
over and the sheet pulling off
as I did so, revealing my cock
lengthening up my belly,
lifting and pulsing in long hardness.

I’d imagine her smile looking
at it and then with a sigh
lifting up and off her blouse,
freeing those heavy breasts
from a white brassiere and
then bending over, touching
both ripening nipples to my cock.

“Close your eyes,” I imagined
she’d whisper, and I would, listening
to the sound of lube squeezing
out and squishing in her hands
then feeling hot dots of that oil
trickle up and down my cock,
rounding the base of my balls
three times while she giggled.

Then I’d feel both of those
strong hands take my cock
sure in their grip and pull,
all the way up to my cockhead
and back down, squeezing the
base of my balls. Oh then I’d
swoon, lost in the long sure
strokes of my naked masseuse,
relieving one stress by stoking
up another, silver-winged and
urgent, up from its swank lair.

Over and again she’d stroke
my cock with her hands; then
she lay low over me to massage
it with her breasts, squeezing them
tightly around its now appalling
length, squishing oil with loud smacks
fast and faster til the table
was rocking with my delight,

sending me up and over with
loud long groan as sperm flew
up at her chin and smile from
my cockhead at the top of
her breasts. And she’d lower
her mouth to suck the last
of my cum, those big brown
eyes staring at me as her
mouth lowered all the way down
to the base of my cock and
slowly out with a smiling release,
mouth gobbed with sperm and
oil, her breasts splattered too,
nipples big and brown and dewy.

Yeah I know, she was only
working at my soles, thumbs
corkscrewing the instep and
fingers pulling each piggy toe
out and out: But I was dreaming
of porking her in her bed
in that next room, she laid
out flat on her belly & her big
ass lubed with massage oil
while I pinned my weight
on her, driving my cock in
and in her cunt, massaging it
between her big asscheeks,
watching it slide in the low
end and pop out the top crack,
then fucking slow and deep
her asshole, sphincter massaging
out my seed in an iron fist,
while the plush bed shook
and quaked and shuddered.

A last transit up from heel to
head and she was done for
our session. “I’ll let you
lay quiet her for a while,”
she’d whisper, dowsing the lights.
And I would, listening to
ethereal space music blend
into the thuds of summer storms,
my soul floating between
the body’s pleasure of touch
and the mind’s augment of it.

Somehow, now as I
think of it, I was in those
sessions delivered over,
by her sure hands
midwifing something in me
to the life that soon
enough came.

She was always a pro; it
could not have gone otherwise
in our sessions -- sex was
simply the wrong altar for
her medicine: But somehow
the dream of fucking her
while those hands worked
my obvious parts was part of the
physic which worked out the
anger and grief and stress and
lust that had so walled up in
my body, that gate to my heart.

Post-session I’d lay flat on my
back on that table with her
hands still ghostly in my soothed
muscles, my mind absently
roused in the one she would
not could not dare not touch,

dreaming high and free as
a stormcloud, watching her
her over me in that bed,
thighs gripping either side
of my waist, breasts swaying
every which way as she
massaged my cock inside
her young woman’s cunt,
the bed careening in
a rout, her whole body
working me, driving every
last demon out, making
room at last in my heart.

I’d like to think she was
tempted but today I’m glad
nothing happened between us --
you know? Just to have those
hands on me -- impartial,
practiced, medicinal hands --
was physic enough for me.

Not long after I started dating
another woman from that class,
then fell in love with someone
at work who was impossible
& so turned to a woman who
became my wife a year later.

I choose to think of that woman’s
hands as Aphroditean doves,
a milky strength that freed this man
enough from one history to
become groom for this next.

Ah, how wonderfully strong
and warm they were, loving
my body while my mind
milked something important
in those fantasias wathing
with my mind’s pent eyes
those big breasts squeezing
 up and down my cock:

Do I tend the actual memory
or celebrate the holiness
of what is yet could never be?
The great thing about poems
is that you don’t have to choose;

her eyes were always so
serious about her work,
desperate to make it in
that trade despite asshole
boyfriend who partied all
the time, despite an addict
mother and jailed father:

Her dreamt eyes were so
loving as she stared at me
sucking out the last of my
cum, or later looking down on
me as her womb milked me
free. They are sufficient
candle for this hour, a light
to hold in the dead of dark
in this ever later season
called middle age.

I could sure use those hands
on my neck today -- somehow
it wrenched in my sleep -- and
my body’s longing for touch
like a castaway for water
as he drifts on the sea.

That’s why I write this stuff
here, I guess, solace of the paper sort
perhaps yet in the poem’s
down- and back-dreaming mind.
Her hand still so strong and
warm and oiled and sure,
sighing to what I write
here almost dangerously,
singing of her healing gift
that freed my body
and mind to love again.