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everything.
    â€œMaggie loves you,” etc., “she’s madder about you than I can ever remember her being mad about anybody else” and in effect she’d say “Maggie loves you, but dont try her patience—tell her you want to marry her or sumptin.” Young girls—giggly—on the porch—as I sit in the living-room dark waiting for Maggie to come back on the chair with me. My tired track team legs are beneath me, folded. I hear other voices on the Cassidy porch, some boys, that Art Swenson I heard about—I feel jealousy but it’s only the bare beginning of all the jealousy that came later. I’m waiting for Maggie to come and kiss me, make it official. While waiting I have ample time to review our love affair; how the first night she’d meant nothing to me when we danced, I held her, she seemed small, thin, dark, unsubstantial, not important enough—Just her strange rare sadness coming from the other side of something made me barely notice she was there: her pretty looks . . . all girls had pretty looks, even G.J. hadnt mentioned her. . . . The profundity wave of her womanhood had not yet settled over me. That was New Year’s Eve—after the dance we’d walked home in the cold night, the snow was over, just tight and soft on the implacable frozen ground, we passed long construction oil flares like avenues and parades on our way down to South Lowell and the banks of the Concord—the silent frost on the rooftops in the starlight, ten degrees above zero. “Sit on the porch awhile anyway—” There were little children-whimpering understandings between us that we would join our lips and kiss even if we had to do it outdoors—The thought of it had begun to excite me even then. But now, waiting in the chair, and why worry about time, the meaning of her kissed had become all things to me. In the variety of the tone of her words, moods, hugs, kisses, brushes of the lips, and this night the upside-down kiss over the back of the chair with her dark eyes heavy hanging and her blushing cheeks full of sweet blood and sudden tenderness brooding like a hawk over the boy over the back, holding the chair on both sides, just an instant, the startling sudden sweet fall of all her hair over my face and the soft downward brush of her lips, a moment’s penetration of sweet lip flesh, a moment’s drowned in thinking and kissing in it and praying and hoping and in the mouth of life when life is young to burn cool skin eye-blinking joy—I held her captured upside down, also for just a second, and savored the kiss which first had surprised me like blind man’s bluff so I didnt know really who was kissing me for the very first instant but now I knew and knew everything more than ever, as, grace-wise, she descended to me from the upper dark where I’d thought only cold could be and with all her heavy lips and breast in my neck and on my head and sudden fragrance of the night brought with her from the porch, of some 5 & 10 cheap perfumes of herself the little hungry scent of perspiration warm in her flesh like preciousness.
    I held her a long time, even when she struggled to fall back. I realized she’d done it for a mood. She loved me. Also I think we were both frightened later when we’d hold a kiss for 35 minutes until the muscles of our lips would get cramps and it was painful to go on—but somehow we were supposed to do this, and what everybody said, the other kids, Maggie and all the others “necking” at skate and post office parties and on porches after dances had learned this was the thing—and did it in spite of how they felt about it personally—the fear of the world, the children clinging in what they think is a mature, secure kiss (challenging and grown-up)—not understanding joy and personal reverence—It’s only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in