The Boys, Waiting (Petaled Gloaming)
after John Dugdale’s “Empire Chair in the Gloaming”
The boys are dying like the daylight.
The boys are beautiful, dying — a vase
of cut sunflowers. Heavy-petaled heads
drooping on wearied neck-stems. Shedding
skins like white nightshirts; hanging
them on the backs of doors which lead
to empty bedrooms. The gloaming
lays its bruised sheen, its yellow-
purple glow over every thing. A chair
waits, empty, to hold a lover. A chair, even
armless, can hold you like a lover; a lover,
like a chair, will wait. Though not forever.
There was a chair which held me
in the long Chicago afternoons, when I
took a few moments to sketch my
horoscope of dust motes while waiting
for dusk and my lover’s return
home. The same chair where he later
sat to break us apart. He was tired
of waiting. Tired of not being handy
enough to repair my heavy sorrows.
You can mend a chair with nails
and glue—but for a lover, that will never
do. There was another chair, green,
child-sized, where I sat when they told
me Saul had died. Unglued by
complications from untreated HIV,
and bipolar disorder, and he’d quit lithium
cold, sudden. He was a queer anarchist
with a mouth on him so when hassled
by a cop for riding his bike
on the sidewalk he jumped off, bike chain
clutched in his scabbed fists.
Come at me, pig.
One little piggy became two, then three.
They smeared his face into twilight, his
mouth into a wet bruise. His teeth strewn
like petals on the filthy pavement.
Loves me, loves me not.
That same chair, I once sat in stoned
and soaked. Listening to the heavy
downpour through the ripped window-
screen. Drops bucket-drumming on
roofs and rushing into gutters. The lovers
waited for the party to start. Where are
the Bridgehouse boys? someone asked. Where
are all the boys? All the boys are drooping their
sunflowered heads in the flooded gutters.
All the boys are homeless, and they’re waiting
for the rain to let up. And outside the window,
the lights blurring; smeared petals
in the gloaming streets. And beyond the streets,
the empty beds. Beyond the rooms, the fields.