Green Music

Because it's a dirt road, and we're having sex in cornfields, I think we're some kind of kinky country song. Walking along to meet her, I'm riffing on a line by a Spanish poet I read. I want to do with you what summer does to cornfields. Bathed by steamy August nights, they become flush, sweat a sweet green candy smell. I'll whisper that line in her ear. Romeo style. Pretend it's mine unless she asks. There is nowhere private, at my house or hers, so we'll meet half way and sneak into the cornfield that swells along the road. As a car blows by, swirling up dust, milkweed fluff and hitchhiking grasshoppers, we point down, pretend to be looking at some roadside curiosity. When the car is gone, we wade in. She's high-fiving the towering leaves like we were coming off the court of a basketball game. We find a little opening where nothing has grown and lie down. She rips the browning tassel off a corn cob and scrunches it between her upper lip and nose like a mustache. Ever want to kiss a guy? she asks, bringing her face closer. Yeah, a guy just like you, I say. After, lying side by side, dirt in our hair and clothes, we gaze up through the canopy of leaves into a crayon blue sky. When autumn comes and the field is plowed, we'll point from the road and pretend we have any idea where we were when she got pregnant. It was there, she says. N'uh, I say, it was further out. There. Random dead yellow stalks stick up like bent arms. I think we're moving in a direction we're not. Tonight, I'm remembering the green music of corn leaves brushing together, how she beautified me, though at eighteen I didn't know the word, how I said yes to it when I meant no, and how all these years later, I'm imagining all the possible endings, good and bad, but then think what's the point, they're still just that: endings.