Chapter 1 – Chapter 1

Note that the poetry in this story is original to the author. It's owned by the story author.

*****

I kiss the dew from your lips,

pausing to revel in the moonlight

glistening on the yielding treasure of you,

anticipating the paradise of

the cool of the desert night yielding to the melting sun.

"Do not tarry, my love," you murmur.

"I see the oasis and the flow of the fountain

just ahead, just there, nearly within reach.

I am almost there.

Come with me."

Over you, around you, inside you,

I resume the journey to paradise.

Over you, around you, inside you,

we ride, ride, ride from the desert of mounted desire

toward the oasis of erupting release.

The plane hit a bit of turbulence and the paper the poetry was written on fluttered to the floor. It took me a bit of digging to retrieve it and slip it back into my notebook. I'd only read the stanzas I had because it had slipped into my lap earlier. Turning toward the window, I could still see the quilt-like pattern of the towns and fields of southern France. We were still climbing in altitude in the flight from Paris to Cairo, though, and it wouldn't be long until we were too far up in the atmosphere's vapor to see land even on a day this clear.

I don't know why I brought the poem with me. I intended to leave it at home. I'm not sure how it got left in the notebook I was taking. It was even more a mystery why I was going to this symposium on Arab literature in Cairo. I had declined earlier invitations to return to Cairo. I'd intended on never going back—back to the man, Afram Garfeh, the famed Egyptian poet, who had penned this poem two decades earlier. For me.

Afram hadn't invited me to the symposium—as far as I knew—but surely he'd be there and he'd know that I was coming. We had conversed over the years, certainly—initially by mail, lately by e-mail. Although the e-mail communications had lost the intimacy of the letters. Afram didn't use the Internet. One of his students acted as a contact go-between. He was a leader in the field of Arab literature internationally, and I taught at Colombia. I can't deny that I was being well served by having studied with him and having contact with him now.

Each year he sent a promising student to me for mentoring. This year it was Samir. Always a young, handsome Egyptian male. I did provide them mentoring, and they all had gone on to good academic positions of their own. Afram was quite discerning and exacting in who he sent to me. To my colleagues, I was providing guidance and placement help, but Afram, who sent them, and the young men themselves knew there was much more involved.

Afram says it was because of what I had meant to him, what I had given him.

I was almost afraid to see him now—likewise because of what I had given him, and how he had used me when we didn't have an ocean to separate us. He must be close to seventy, I suddenly thought, as I read over the opening stanzas of his poem again.

I had been barely twenty-one when I arrived at the American University in Cairo, then on Tahir Square, now further out in what was called New Cairo. I was a child prodigy, already working on my doctorate in literature, needing to improve my Arabic so that I could specialize in Arabic literature. Afram was a legend in the field even then.

He was a god to me.

I was a virgin to the ways of man sex, and within two weeks of studying under him, mesmerized by his reading of his own poetry, I was lying under him on the studio couch in his university office and panting and sobbing as he clutched my buttocks to him and pushed inside me, breached my ring, and slow pumped me deeply. He was a gentle lover—at least at first—but, using my hero worship and my naïveté, he had taken what he wanted from me. And he had conditioned me to want it too.

He was a virile man in those days, one needing the attention of a young man to write that special poetry that found its way into the private collections of special collectors, and he fucked me, initially on his office couch but later in his traditional-style home, almost daily for the year and a half I was with him.

By the time I left him and returned to the States, I was as jaded and needy as he was.

The plane lurched a bit and the piece of paper slid out onto my lap again. I lifted it and read a few more stanzas before tucking it away.

"Just ahead!" you cry out.

"See it there?"

The flash of sunlight, the searing heat.

The cry in the night.

"Take me there, Love! Come with me!"

Over you, around you, inside you,

faster, faster we ride,

reaching out for the shelter of the oasis ahead,

of the fountain, the cool waters afterglow.

Over you, around you, inside you.

"Do you see it not?" you cry out.

"The searing sun! The fountain!

We ride together, Love! It's there; it's here! It's now!"

The searing sun of your journey's end explodes,

fountains, to your melting into the cool embrace of the oasis.

I couldn't help but smile. After that first time, Afram had not touched me for two weeks. He had apologized, and, in shock, I don't think I reacted much at all. I knew that was my inclination and had known it for some time. But I hadn't had the courage to pursue my feelings.

Who would have known that the reading of erotic poetry by the poet himself could seduce me as easily as Afram Garfeh had?

After two weeks, in which I went from fear and self-condemnation and the feeling of being trapped in an alien land under the control of a man who took everything he wanted from me to the extreme, I slowly worked my way into waiting for his call. Without seeking it myself, I anticipated the opportunity to be alone with him again in his office, for him to demand that I attend him, or to ask me to lie under him. In the last days, while he continued to make me stew, I needed him just to look at me with affection and crook his finger at me.

He asked me, along with the other members of my study group, to a traditional Egyptian meal in his home. His home was of ancient style, in an exclusive section Cairo, on the island of Gezirah, in the Nile between Old Cairo and Giza, land of the pyramids. It was a compound of four sides, a blank wall to the street, with an atrium in the center squared in with columned passageways. The atrium was a veritable oasis that served Garfeh, a widower even then with several young male servants, as both living and dining area as the weather permitted. There was a cooling pool in the center, with a fountain. Palm trees surrounded the pool, indeed giving the space the feeling of being an oasis.

I was asked to stay after the others had left. We sat, close, side by side, on a couch beside the pool. He was wearing the traditional Egyptian robe, a gallibaya, and I was in Western wear, a white cotton shirt and dark trousers, with sandals. Embracing me with one arm, he unbuttoned my shirt and palmed my breast and we kissed several times, each time more deeply than the one before. I knew he was going to fuck me again, and I was relieved to know that I held favor with him still. He recited a poem to me, a poem he said he had just begun, the first three stanzas of this very poem I was reading for the umpteenth time in the plane over southern France.

I knew he was going to fuck me there on the couch by his pool, and, of course, he did. I opened my legs to him without a whimper.

He pulled away from me but only long enough to lift the gallibaya over his head. He was naked under the robe. Thick-bodied, but mostly muscled, in upward-curved erection. He moved his embracing arm under my arm pits and I lay back, my shirt brushed open, as his lips and tongue moved from the hollow of my neck down to my nipples. His free hand slid down my belly, unzipped my trousers, found my cock, and possessed me.

His lips went to mine and we kissed as he slowly stroked my cock to an erection. He was taking me more slowly now. He had first taken me quickly, and I had been so surprised and overwhelmed that I had come almost immediately and then had just lain there, collapsed and barely conscious, as he had fucked on to his own ejaculation. Now he was taking his time.

We disengaged from the kiss and, looking into my eyes and still stroking my cock, he recited the three stanzas of the poem I had just reread. When he reached the line "The searing sun of your journey's end explodes,/fountains, to your melting into the cool embrace of the oasis," I erupted into an ejaculation.

He held me there, tenderly, as I moaned and my trembling slowly subsided. Then we spoke in a low voice.

"I wish for you to be my assistant in a project. I am having difficulty finishing this poem. I wish you to help me with it—with your body."

"It's a powerful poem already," I whispered.

"It is more poetic in Arabic. When you are conversant, you must read it in Arabic. But do you understand the poem? Do you understand why I have reached an impasse with it?"

"No, Mudarres, I don't."

"How does it end at this point?"

"With an ejaculation. The receiver's ejaculation."

"True, but is that what the lovers want?"

"I don't understand. What do they want?"

"The young receiver says, 'Take me there, Love! Come with me!' What is the goal of these lovers, of this poem?"

I thought for a moment, and he let me do so, holding me close to his naked body, his erection rubbing against my now-bare thigh, his hand gliding over my body, making my cock start to reengorge.

"Is it that they want to come together?"

"Yes, and that is what I want as well, with you, so that I can bring this poem to conclusion."

He gently pushed me down on my back on the couch, then, my left leg bent, my foot on the stone of the patio. He turned and rose and brought his left leg up on the couch beside my right thigh and hooked my right leg over his thigh. He slowly entered my channel with his curved cocked.

And fucked me and fucked me and fucked me.

I came the second time several minutes before he did.

"No matter; there is time," he whispered to me. Then, after we had rested a bit, he turned and sat on the side of the couch. He reached over and lifted me by the waist with his strong hands, and lowered me on his cock, facing away from him. Running his hands down the underside of each of my legs, he lifted and spread them. I raised my arms and locked my fists behind his neck.

He fucked me, raising and lowering me on the cock in ever faster motion. That time we came closer together but not together.

I smiled at how hard we had tried that time—he so that he could complete his poem; me to please him.

I couldn't help it. The memory of how hard we tried amused me, even today. I now had the urge to read more of the poem. I pulled it out of the notebook. This time it didn't have to force itself on me.

Over you, around you, inside you. Still.

I ride you still as a camel relentlessly undulates across the sands,

seeking for myself your paradise,

the oasis, the fountain, the cooling waters.

Riding you, riding you, riding you.

And seeing my own oasis ahead,

I ride harder, faster,

Through the searing heat and the flowing fountain,

To my own paradise—

and our shared sighs.

We never did come together, no matter how hard we tried, in that year and a half. I was always too anxious and he didn't think about anyone but himself enough to discover how to hold me off. But we both did come each time.

He did finish the poem, of course. He was too good a poet not to finish it, although it could not flow down to the conclusion he had anticipated. And I didn't think the poem suffered from the march to a new ending. In fact, I found it more poignant, more human. In its own way more resilient and hopeful.

I glanced down to read the end of the poem, but the announcement came onto the speaker that we were circling for a landing in Cairo. I slid the poem back into the pages of the notebook—deep enough so that it now wouldn't slide out; the poem was too precious to me to lose—and turned my head to the window. I had not seen Cairo for so long; I wanted to drink in as much of the city from the air as I could as we landed.

I would finish rereading the poem later, in my hotel room, as I contemplated meeting my old lover, Afram Garfeh, face-to-face again, after more than two decades.