Eternal Yet Ephemeral, Lust Comes Sharply Into Focus…and Fades

Their lips are poised to meet in a classic gesture of pure desire. Her lips are soft and vulnerable, easily bruised, his more determined, principled, their mouths slightly open as though to ask a question.

- Robert Coover

Do they know each other? It doesn’t matter. Only the imminent meeting of their yearning mouths matters. There is something gravely intimate about the moment, something almost sacred in its graceful choreography.

He is handsome in a rugged honest way; she is radiantly beautiful. A disembodied narrative voice is quietly cataloging: her heaving bosom, her flushed throat, her fluttering eyelids, her supple hips. Which could be where the man’s unseen hands are, just below the frame, these his general impressions. Are their lips moving? Perhaps they are whispering something to each other. Or maybe they simply like the feel of moving lips, brushing softly against their own.

The voice speaks now of the frame’s grip on a composed reality, its power to clasp and hold an image abstracted from the ceaseless flow of time, as the two gaze longingly into each other’s eyes. A tear glitters in one of hers. His, shadowed by the brim of his fedora, betray an infinite sadness, and we too feel sad; how can we not? In their eyes — lenses facing in and out at the same time — we see what they see and feel what they feel. We are inside their kiss, tasting the proximity of their lips, suffering their anguish, their ardor, their aroused anatomies (there are chemicals involved, hormones). We know nothing about them beyond this embrace, but we sense that, whoever they are, they are about to part.