Writing my name twenty-two times, I think of you
writing my name in the silly frame of love
you's. My cursive is loopy, archaic, a lost art,
and you suspect you were never in the subject
position, so you've given up the ghost on the catbird seat,
and you know I could write everything you're afraid of,
and that too, you're afraid of. You blithely tossed
my name into the tiny pulses of l's and o's. Could I
have stopped you, would I have ta-ta-ed you before
you sent the photograph? Tall drink of a kid in a pale
tutu, deliberate shadow cupping your jaw on a day
you were screaming with fiasco, I offer you
gravity in an envelope from Indonesia, patience
from a spring in Missouri, and that bewildered flock
of shady lovers, a lesson in courtly love, a handful
of words in languages you don't want to know.
I've bid my bones dance too hard for you, boy
of my heart the blue moon brought and took off
in all of one day - but not before I got you as image:
a man reduced to a boy parading as a girl, wrapping
himself into the fleshy envelope we call fetal position,
all your straight bones in the inevitable knot.
Traveler's cheques, of course, why else would one
sign away so many loops and angles. The point of the pen
is that I'm buying money with my name on it
for the trip to you, and I'm bringing Keats on a string,
Pope on a stick, Wordsworth on ten dollars a day.
You're still talking about sex, though the weather likes to taunt
us that nothing stays pretty. You've taken the old doctor to heart,
No one your age is reading it. Eliot's a bore, and Dickinson's
but only a pinch or the rosemary will be overwhelmed.
at this moment, this confluence of sound, weather, signs
different now that you are. My dear, I'm down to bones,
poems only for you. You've just discovered giving up
I've used it for years: the ghost is merely an elusive
enough burning or breath to see through to an end.
on the edge of middle age, your cliche, your impossible
and not about to die of it. Think of it, the malice I could bear
You could be my blue boutonniere from a long ago year,
can you rise above your pond green Gap shirt, Boss belt
from the barrel I found it in. I'll give you no more stories,
little chokes of lightning in a dull sky. We're going
on the twenties, twelve times on the fifties—that's still
we die of. Snide remarks heal any wound, believe me.
Love it or leave it, but don't watch too long. It's a dance
already— like the old trance dancer's toes.
move in with their murmurs and cameras. His pony's a stick
do the solo dance on coals, but they're good at the Kechak chants—
all boys with red frangipani blossoms stuffed over their ears.
in brand new sarongs comb their damp hanks of hair in rooms
for the boys to return in their crisp, white shirts, destar wrapped
of tea and sure fingers into lamplit rooms where desire
yes, no, come, go, here and there, gecko and clove,
If this is a ghost, why does it pack its bags so carefully—
There's a flask of grief in here somewhere too. And sweetie
in the book on the absence of men and the presence
who's anyone has always already said, Hurry up please, it's time.
