San Francisco, 1992
for B & E
In this weather’s patchwork:
men colluding around
their Marlboro Reds,
faces lanterned as if
caught beneath the gaze
of a lighthouse from just past
the palisades. You have yet to
replace the missing button
on your coat; your
shaky hands pull the gray
wool closer to your chest.
The moon above files
its chrome teeth in ennui; see,
how the man’s face rings with distrust!
I worry, I cannot help myself …
In bed, I count the twisted knots
of your spine as they push
against flesh. I map the web
of weakened veins, those corridors
filled with the same blood that
betrays you now. Still, you stride
ahead of me through
the loam-like darkness, taller than I remember
you ever being;
you ask me why
should I be afraid
of the end?
⟐ ⟐ ⟐ ⟐ ⟐
The Boys
for Edward
April unspools within you, barbed ball of thread.
Again and again, the river walk
empty of lovers. The pier and
its rotten teeth, haggard
as they pierce the Hudson’s
flesh. You count them off:
ghosts with hard bodies and ghosts
with wet tongues, ghosts with slick fingers
and convincing eyes and the understanding
of all things that cannot last.
Your body stilled; a freighter bloated with old revelries
as it drifts at the long-languished ports.
You still feel how they made your limbs
thrash above your head, thrown
like an oracle divining his gods; now they are held
only in the back of your skull
as memory, or perhaps a punishment. Their faces
tender and crimson. Fresh wounds. The boy
whose calloused hands undressed you
that first night downtown; the boy
who shared his last ecstasy tab
because he thought
you had a pretty, if not nervous, smile; the boy
who said he loved you
because that’s what you needed to hear in the dark.
The boys the boys the boys
that choir of seraphim still sweet
in the back of your throat on a day like today.
April binds you into an ornate
string of knots, your veins the fray
of a rope bearing too much weight. It pushes up
through the graveyard dirt like a crown of daisies
around their heads. Every year: April.
Its warm, ancient breath. Again
and again, April; how it wields the faces
of those boys who didn’t survive, how it
holds them on its cunning tongue. And you,
you who are still here
to speak their names.