Blue on Blue Ground [1 ed.] 9780822990918, 9780822958888

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Blue on Blue Ground

2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize p i t t p o e t ry s e r i e s Ed Ochester, Editor

BLUE on BLUE GROUND

Aaron Smith

University of Pittsburgh Press

The publication of this book is supported by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Copyright © 2005, Aaron Smith All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 isbn 0-8229-5888-0

for Irene McKinney

CONTENTS

Part I Keep Him There 3 Working Out with the Boys 4 Dr. Engel Buys the Jesus-on-a-Spring Action Figure 6 Notes Composed in a Heat Wave 7 Secrets of an Identity Thief 8 Wreckage 9 Confrontation 11 Psalm: West Virginia 12 How Easily He Moves 13 Dr. Engel Survives the Blackout in New York City 16 Rain in Pittsburgh 17 Jockstrap 18 Her Bright Face at the Places of Our Leaving 19 Boston 21 Dr. Engel Writes a Love Letter 23 Part II The Signs of Choking 27 Taking Off from the Airport / Cleveland, Ohio 29 Dr. Engel Goes to the Nudist Colony 31 Brad Pitt 33 Boston 34 Cher Uncensored 36 Silent Room 37 Prayer for a Doctor 39 New Zealand Hand Model Stuart Poses with Kiwifruit and Has a Foot Fetish (notes from an interview) 40

Valedictory 42 Frank O’Hara 44 The Story of Your Leaving 45 Music History 46 Story 48 Then 50 Dr. Engel Studies John Currin’s Paintings 52 The Last Small Thing 53 Late 56 Ars Poetica 57 Part III Dark, Awful Man 61 Dr. Engel Interprets Rothko’s Blue, Green, Blue on Blue Ground 67 Dear Matt Damon 69 The Trick 70 Explanation 72 Snow 74 Things I Could Never Tell My Mother 75 Sightings 77 Poem for the End of Summer 78 Dr. Engel Passes a Generically Attractive Couple 79 What’s Required 81 After Coming Out to My Sister 82 After-School Special 83 Dr. Engel Teaches the Poet How to Swim 84 Learning the Body 86 Notes Composed on a Sidewalk 88 Notes 89 Acknowledgments 91

PART I Names for the moon: Harvest; and Blue; and Don’t Touch Me— Carl Phillips, Rock Harbor

Keep Him There on Second Avenue in his white T-shirt, jeans securely fastened, before you smile at him, before he smiles back. Before he asks for your phone number and you give it. Keep him there before karaoke, the silly Whitney Houston song when he asks you to dance, before you lean in and realize how long it’s been, before he puts his hands on you from behind, calls you beautiful, and you believe him in spite of yourself. Keep him there before he pulls your shirt off, kisses the meat of your chest, takes your chin in his hands, says, Look at you. Before the nights of I’m so lucky, the vacation, the deserted road in Provincetown when he drops the bike, makes love to you. Keep him there before it’s comfortable, before the corner by the deli when you ask him if your shirt looks okay, and he snaps, You worry too much about nothing. Before the window you leave open because the apartment is empty and strange. Keep him there before your friends are tired of hearing it and you sit on the floor in the middle of take-out boxes watching Taxi. Before you’re numb, before you know everyone walks around with holes in them. Keep him there before the other men, the one with the shoulders and the slow voice, the Counting Crows CD you buy again because it reminds you, before the good days when you only think of him once, before it’s been several months and you say, I’m okay. Keep him there before that Sunday when you pass him on Broadway and you’re awkward, way too friendly, like two strangers after a long correspondence, finally meeting.

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Working Out with the Boys They could be making love, these straight boys, judging from the sounds, their breathing quick, forced like before orgasm: the soft strain of men pushing their bodies, breaking themselves down while other men watch or help. Someone saying, Come on, come on, push it, push: a final throaty groan, an almost comecry, as a barbell is raised one more time, one more time, then dropped or slammed down on the mat, muscles exhausted, trembling, high fives, a shirt raised to wipe sweat from a face. They’re not like me, but they are, staring at their own swollen biceps and chests in full-length mirrors on the wall we pretend are for checking form: knees slightly bent, back straight, slow, smooth movements, remember

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to breathe. Of course they’re here to be made more beautiful— but who would ever admit that?— lying flat on backs, balancing huge weights over chests, —holding, holding—arms about to collapse when another man standing close, staring straight into his friend’s struggling face, leans over fast, reaches, finally, in.

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Dr. Engel Buys the Jesus-on-a-Spring Action Figure and spends a few minutes mirroring the way the lordandsaviorchristalmighty’s hands clap or seem to have been clapping or are getting ready to clap again (go team jesus!) or were maybe praying (our father which art) and have been released like a bad film straight to DVD or video. Or maybe jesus has hands to go with his vibrating, his floppy frenzy: goofy, limp-wristed. Dr. Engel imagines suction-cupping jesus to the side of his computer (tech junky jesus) while he e-mails, a nice alternative to the cross, at the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light . . . or to the hood of his mother’s scratched-up toyota corolla that’s red as blood (too easy to think blood, but still Dr. Engel thinks it), the blood of the lamb, the blood of the lamb springing up and down, retarded some might think, going, going, going, going, going . . .

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Notes Composed in a Heat Wave I realize a strange affection for my doctor because he knows too much and is happy. I’m dizzy in Manhattan and think how terrible our lives behind these walls. I saw inside once, imagined brick and steel dissolved, and I could hardly stand how we carried on, stacked on top of each other, separate floors, divided into rooms, so close and yet so lonely. Nothing’s real in August, heat dissolving us to body. Yesterday, I had an intimate relationship with the throat of a man on a crowded train. He smelled like soap and second chances. My doctor prescribes another pill. So much work to feel happy. I tell him I cried this morning because we die, because we are given back. He says, but not tomorrow. He says, you really should try to be kind to yourself.

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Secrets of an Identity Thief Never give your name. Call yourself Gone Again or Probably. Listen to conversations around you in restaurants. They have everything to do with you but aren’t anything you can’t laugh about at parties. Sell yourself short, at a discount, fifty percent off the lowest price. Bargain bin. Two for one. But never give yourself, not even once, for free. Say, No. Say, I wasn’t able to. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Every train leaving: be on it. Every love ending: cause it. Everything that’s asked of you is too much. Say, Too much. Say, I used to. Say, I never wanted this.

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Wreckage They’re searching the ocean for JFK Jr., and I’m sitting on the crinkled paper of an examination table waiting for a doctor to search my body for a knot I’m sure I felt in my testicles last week. I leave my underwear on while I wait because the place feels like a sterile living room: the watercolor New England landscapes in silver frames, juxtaposed with the orange biohazard disposal box on the cream walls, make me feel awkward and dirty at the same time, as though guests for a dinner party could walk through the door, afraid to touch me. They’re still calling the mission a search and rescue, meaning—even though it’s been two days and the chances a person could live in the Atlantic without food or freshwater that long are slim—we need hope: the nurse’s smile is forced when she finds out why I’m here (the pamphlet says nearly all irregularities in the testicular region are cancer). I remember one photo of JFK, a Hyannisport shot, shirtless, wet, windblown. He’s just jogged down the beach after diving into steel blue waves, is on his way back to shore for a heroic catch of a football. I jerked off to that scene as a teenager 9

for months, and today I can’t believe someone young and handsome can die. I think about running out of the office. What if I really am sick? I could refuse treatment, never tell anyone, vanish to a new city, wait. The Kennedys are in retreat at their estate on the Cape, waiting for news from the Coast Guard. I think about how the nothing they’ve found means hope: JFK waiting on an island, expecting to be rescued, but tomorrow, when they change the mission to search and recover, expecting only wreckage, nothing will mean despair. The whole sleepless week I’ve wondered if a life of shame could cause a lump to form, disease a kind of strange mercy for a body wanting to rid itself of the source, self-loathing putting desire to death.

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Confrontation You’ll not live through this. It’s going to kill you. Don’t you feel foolish now? Running around all this time hungry for meaning, thinking life was just leaning against the wall, waiting for you to come along and define it, give it texture, depth. Don’t you get it? The light in the corner has nothing to do with mercy. It’s not a sign. Of course you’ll be strong. We love a good story, need something to inspire us. Inspire us. You’re not fooling anyone. Everyone knows what you really wanted: a body to push against your body, something sorry you could swear was love, yep, something that boring and predictable. God you really are that simple. You silly silly shit. You stupid stupid boy. Thinking you’d get what you asked for.

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Psalm: West Virginia I press my feet to the window, squash birds like ants with my toes. The phone is a tumor refusing to ring in the part of my brain that wants things. I kept you tight as tupperware, and I’m sorry. I finally understand: We eat and we fuck and we bury each other, and not a goddamn thing I can do about that. I’m scattered like freckles. I’m lost as a wallet. I’m the neighbor’s blue pickup broke down. Come home. Come home.

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How Easily He Moves 1. First Night in the City There’s a different kind of loneliness in the city, one of thousands of people rushing away, headfirst into their lives, over the same sidewalks and streets that at night are forbidden like desire: His boxers just above his shorts, his military haircut, hard pillow of stomach, wedding ring. You followed him to the back room: a single lightbulb dripped light behind him, made his body a strange shadow moving inside you. You held him in your mouth while he came, shaking, slamming harder into your face. His: slutty boy, his: pussy boy. You were scared. He wouldn’t kiss you good-bye. Lying in bed I stare at your picture on the wall, the day in college we all skipped class and went to Audra State Park. The picture looks slick and cold from the streetlight outside the window. I can’t make out shapes. The city burns with little bits of fire against the sky.

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2. Clarification Last night I followed a man around a bar hoping to brush against his green T-shirt to feel the pad of his chest against my shoulder or arm, but before that he danced with his shirt off, tucked in the white band of his underwear, lights marking his body, music making him a story whispered ear to ear through a room. I’ve been thinking how the erotic lives in what we’re denied, the object about to be exposed, on the verge of coming undone. The night we met I asked you to take your pants off. What I really meant was unzip them and let them ride low on your hips.

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3. How Easily He Moves running his hand over his body, tracing, retracing the transformation of boy to man. Did he resent the thick blotches sprouting, the single strands lining his lip, the cracking voice that was grinned at? Was he embarrassed when his mother looked under his arm or the first time he swam with his sister, trunks clinging? There is no ceremony, no trip to the store, no announcement to mothers or friends. There is only the stillness of the rooms where sheets and underwear are stained, where we listen for silence and slip out of bed to hide evidence of feeling, realizing then why our fathers never touch us: between the bed and the bathroom they learned to go quietly alone.

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Dr. Engel Survives the Blackout in New York City and predicts the birthrate to skyrocket and the amount of gay boys needing penicillin to increase and increase until his waiting room is just a strobe light and cocktail away from being a gay bar. He thinks of Alaska and how it’s dark there, though everybody he’s talked to who’s lived there says it’s not what everybody thinks: not blue and moist like an orifice or mysterious like a virgin birth or christ, for that matter, who instead is shaved and shiny, shaking it like a lap dancer working the bars of Alliance, Ohio and a few more towns beyond.

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Rain in Pittsburgh It’s raining in Pittsburgh, and the people of Pittsburgh go on needing things: Levothroid for their thyroids, theft protection for their debit cards, legislation against same-sex benefits. The third graders in Pittsburgh need glasses. The third graders in Pittsburgh know one day the earth will collide with the sun, and still they manage to giggle about tongue kissing. The women of Pittsburgh say dumb things at lunch: I think he’s the one or Mr. Right will come along, just believe. The men of Pittsburgh still believe in female orgasm through intercourse. The men of Pittsburgh have hairy backs and wear tank tops without waxing. Everyone in Pittsburgh farts when they pee. Nobody flushes. Nobody uses a turn signal. They’re gearing up in Pittsburgh for a football game, for thunder and lightning applause, for body paint and beer. They’re preparing for a gorgeous American war. They’re patriots in Pittsburgh and traitors. They carry guns in Pittsburgh. They want peace. They wear sensible shoes and have stiff hair. Everything is gray and smells better there.

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Jockstrap It is not until later when dad tells me you don’t wear underwear with those things! that I go to my room and slip it up, bare ass hanging out, balls mashed tight and get hard thinking of the other boys in gym class, the ones with hair under their arms, early muscles. Do they stand in front of mirrors like me yanking jocks down quickly to watch dicks flop out hard, angry turtle heads? Do their ears turn red from shame? Do they hate to play basketball?

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Her Bright Face at the Places of Our Leaving Someone is missing again and this time it’s a woman. Subway steps and bus stops: every possible escape pasted with her face (short blonde hair, two commas for lips, last seen wearing an orange hat). They’re hoping a city’s million eyes will bring her back. Last month it was a boy: retarded, walked two blocks to the store for gum, the youngest son of two. His parents on the news: It isn’t like him to wander off. In January we saw the video of a girl: every living room in America saying no, no, as the man in Florida took her arm, led her away, so easily, as if ripping a life apart starts with a familiar gesture. There’s Mary Hughes who for nearly a year watched from every shop window; every street sign and light held her up—Last seen entering her apartment on the Upper East Side— but when the police found her it was worse than expected: buried in a suitcase in a basement in New Jersey. Someone wanted her to remain unexplained, actually carried her body from Manhattan, mixed the concrete. I imagined a story for her: She’d had enough, couldn’t answer one more call, say please

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or excuse me to one more fucking person. Maybe she remembered a word she’d heard once that made her think of a town to which she’d never been, but wanted to visit, and she left. Just like that: a few envelopes in the mailbox, the cluttered kitchen with unwashed dishes. How is there any rest in the world? I’ll never see this new woman, I know. Her bright face at the places of our leaving each day becomes the stranger we’re glad we never spoke to, becomes every scratched-up van we’ve walked beside without thinking, the person on the interstate we almost picked up, the lost, erasable parts of us.

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Boston I’ve been meaning to tell you how the sky is pink here sometimes like the roof of a mouth that’s about to chomp down on the crooked steel teeth of the city I remember the desperate things we did and that I stumble down sidewalks listening to the buzz of street lamps at dusk and the crush of leaves on the pavement, Without you here I’m viciously lonely and I can’t remember the last time I felt holy, the last time I offered myself as sanctuary •••

I watched two men press hard into each other, their bodies caught in the club’s bass drum swell, and I couldn’t remember when I knew I’d never be beautiful, but it must have been quick 21

and subtle, the way the holy ghost can pass in and out of a room. I want so desperately to be finished with desire, the rushing wind, the still small voice.

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Dr. Engel Writes a Love Letter And he ankle-sprain slips and begins with Flowers red Like swelling, lips Stitched and tender after a fall on his face Down concrete steps and fall Is what he did: crash-fast and jagged As a car accident. More people die From sadness each year than from car wrecks And bone cancer combined. Eyes blue As lungs, as a varicose map On a supple thigh and sleeping With your legs crossed causes blood clots and loss, Loss, loss is better than never Not beginning or so he’s been told And so writes that illegibly Down.

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PART II Bravo, I cry, swallowing the pills, the do die pills. Listen ducky, death is as close to pleasure as a toothpick. Anne Sexton, Words for Dr. Y.

The Signs of Choking The Victim Can’t Speak or Breathe and the world is silent, a slow blur, each red car in front of you: specific, the strangers around you: pure movement, everything enlarged, then microscopic, trying to get back inside your body, and then you remember your first pillow (smelled of Tide), your first pair of Underoos (Superman), your first swim (afraid to go underwater), your first day leaving home (the Disney-school-bus-lunch-pail in your hand) and how your mother cried in the kitchen window, remember the way everything always never mattered before this? The Victim Collapses again and again and differently with each remembering, and just maybe it was meant to be this way or already happened, always already happening, just maybe the one last thing that matters is how you die, or the one good suit you wore everywhere to everything that made you feel important and happy, or the way you let yourself be touched and tasted and liked it, the way you didn’t know then your father driving off in his red pickup would be every man you’d ever love returning love. The Victim Turns Blue and it’s not so bad really, is it? to be the robe of a virgin who made a savior who saved a world from wanting, not so bad to be a bruise spit out from the mouth of last night’s undressed stranger, a Magic Marker uncapped on the living room floor 27

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of a snooty next-door neighbor, a dead friend’s favorite cup filled up and sipped from each morning, a broken-in pair of jeans, a perfectly stained T-shirt, to crave what you were afraid to crave and get it.

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Taking Off from the Airport / Cleveland, Ohio You understood this was death, the immediate becoming details, retracting to the whole ordered expanse of itself, and you never knew the hill you stared at your whole life from the kitchen window was really the smallest part of a large stretch of hills for miles and miles and beyond that when the clouds overtook you in the capsule pressurized for your comfort, the capsule that reminded you that you were living and tired, and tired, and you were never good with words, but you describe it: the feeling right after you cry, but you haven’t cried because

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you’re not alone, but in the company of the most beautiful strangers you’ve ever seen. Close your eyes, lean into the curve of the good-bye of your life. Hear someone say, We’re almost home, and for the first time and last know what that means, everything you never thought you wanted and fine.

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Dr. Engel Goes to the Nudist Colony and starts giving physicals, mentally, laying each person back, asking probing questions in a calm, firm voice, politely, yet seriously so the patients will tell only truth: are you experiencing any pain? when was your last period, the last time you had sex? how is your diet, how are your bowel movements, are you exercising? your numbers were a bit high the last time you were in—pressing on their stomachs, each expectant breast, each man a head turned left and coughing— and because he is on vacation he can be mean, compare body parts to sausage, chipped ham, and smelly cheese, and because he is on vacation he can encourage the swelling inside, admit the thick honey center of himself wants more than the transaction of rubber gloves on flesh, professional conversation

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and distance which only leave him lonely and home each night whispering his patients’ names— as if they haven’t left or might answer him—over and over and over.

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Brad Pitt With cotton candy armpits and sugary Crevices, sweat glazing your donut skin. Have you ever been fat, Brad? Have you ever wanted a Snickers More than love and lain on your bed While the phone rang and rolled one On your tongue, afraid to eat it, afraid It would make your jeans too tight? Have you Barfed, Brad, because you ate it, Ate all the take-out, licked Brown sauce off the box while you sobbed? Brad Pitt down in the pits chaining menthol Ciggys in your thick-wallet life, It’s not so bad Brad, sad Brad, is it?

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Boston Through the window night has stripped off the humid lights of the city and is cooling her long, black body in the Charles. The city is slight, smoldering, each movement planned: first there, then there, there. They tell the students at the school where I work not to walk alone in the park, it’s dangerous, abandoned, someone could make their lives stories that shake people from sleep, and yet I’ve always felt safe here. I walk down Beacon and see the rich through brownstone windows, their griefs and plans perfected behind glass, so many worlds go on without me. I loved a man I couldn’t have. Actually, we were strangers and hopeful and wise enough to leave it scattered across the room, our small beginning stepped over, and in a sense better than a future. Maybe I’ve said too much. Once, it started to rain, it started to rain in that way that should change something, but doesn’t, everyone scattered, shielding themselves like people 34

running from catastrophe, certain only in their going.

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Cher Uncensored Walking to lunch I am Cher in Moonstruck, freshly fucked, kicking a can down the street in last night’s sultry, strapless gown the color of pennies, my thick black hair still stunning, lips swollen from kisses, coat dark as the heart-shaped hickey on my neck. I think of Nicolas Cage and falling for his speech after our secret date when those damn snowflakes fell on cue like they do in movies, his annoying lecture on their imperfection, like the imperfection of love, and the bullshit of fairy tales, how nothing turns out as we plan, and taking his wooden hand I follow him up the stairs to his surprisingly well-decorated apartment out of the cold and out of my panties into his bed where we do it for hours like rock stars, the naked moon exposing itself like a pervert. I clutch his unusually hairy body to mine, and our oily screams drench the room in a disjointed operatic soundtrack: Oh Nicolas! Oh Cher! Oh Nicolas! Oh Cher! Cher! Cher! Cher!

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Silent Room Take a drink of water, hold the cup to my lips for 8 counts: curl my toes, stretch my fingers, move my stomach in and out, in and out. Twitch my arm, twitch my arm, only 5 more times, the other, the same, my ankle, blink, blink, blink, blink. Stare at the lock on the door, push it over, hold it hard, harder, push it, 8 counts, forget why I’m staring, start over, start over. I haven’t done dishes in a week, laundry in a month, or eaten anything but McDonald’s for lunch for as long as I can remember. I am wearing dirty underwear. I am wearing dirty socks. I am wearing a dirty T-shirt, and I can’t go to the doctor because I know 37

I’m dying, I’m dying and I’m taking that damn iron with me tomorrow when I leave the apartment. Its snakelike cord on the floor not enough to convince me it isn’t plugged in, that everything I am isn’t burning.

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Prayer for a Doctor May sadness tighten your belt, cause your body To swell, your head Leak serotonin, and nobody, noBody to listen. May your wait in yellow Rooms be long And terrifying, may you stand and run Hands over tools left out to be used On you. May you be bullied. May appointments be impossible. May you miss work to sit And sit and worry and nobody Care, nobody care. May your body Be stripped and seen, stripped clean, Shaved, made dirty With touch, erased from the sum Back to parts. May your body be taken Apart. May your body be taken. May you tremble, Be told to relax, Calm down. May the light turn black, And the air turn thin As silk, may your coat be stained, May your coat be stained.

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New Zealand Hand Model Stuart Poses with Kiwifruit and Has a Foot Fetish (notes from an interview) When he makes love with exquisitely manicured hands he thinks of competitive eating, conspiracy theories, and Liquid Paper on places it shouldn’t be, but really he thinks of the place inside that’s given up on love and wanting to be touched by lesser hands, callused hands with hairy, hairy knuckles and hangnails. Favorite Photo Shoots: a) Scissors: He loves holding the potential end of his career; sometimes when nobody is looking he jumps up and down with them on his palm. He touches the sharp tips, swears his fingers go numb nearly begging. b) Produce: There’s nothing like the contrast of flesh on fruit, nothing, he says, I mean nothing! In the supermarket he caresses apples, nearly weeping as the thin skin gives beneath his thumb. Shy bananas, kiwifruits, plums. c) Products that require pouring and/or stirring: Fabric softeners, especially in deep blue containers, diet sodas (he loves to disembody his perfect hand and let it belong, if only for a little while, to a perfect body that’s not his body, that’s somebody else’s), coffee creamers, and lotion. Will not do: self-tanners, astringents (even with gloves), latex gloves or anything medical. Will not open condoms on film though he uses them. Quote: “Did you know the easiest way to eat kiwi (once called Chinese gooseberries (slang: goat balls)) is slooping? Just cut a kiwifruit in half, then scoop the delicious goodness right out of the skin. It’s as easy as eating a soft-boiled egg.” Quote: “One day I woke up and knew that New Zealand was nothing more than Australia’s deflated cock.”

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Favorite quote by someone else: “I remember looking at myself in a mirror and becoming a total stranger.”—Joe Brainard, I Remember Once his father tickled his feet until he peed, and he really did pee, most people say that and don’t mean it, say it to make a point, for exaggeration, but he really peed and his father made him stand in the corner in his peed-in pants while he spanked him and spanked him and spanked him. Kiwifruit was thought of as a tonic for growing children. http://www.samcooks.com/relish/kiwi.html) Male feet, toe sucking, shoe sex, tickle torture, pedal pumping, stomp, bastinado, perfectly pulled up pairs of tube socks from Kmart that squeeze the calves firmly enough to leave a mark. In terms of worldwide kiwifruit production, Italy is no. 1 followed by New Zealand, Chile, France, Japan, Greece, the United States, Portugal, Korea, Spain, and Australia. There is such a thing as a hand supermodel. One day he hopes to direct infomercials. He has an idea for a clamp that can be placed on top of umbrellas to keep them from flipping inside out in a storm. Don’t write that, though, someone may steal his idea. Toes, he doesn’t really like toes.

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Valedictory They’re having this dinner for me, and I’m stuck staring at the city through the big window that takes up most of the wall. I’ve been doing this a lot lately, looking out past wherever I am, whoever I’m around. It’s childish and probably boring, but since you died I like to pretend you’re out there. Perhaps on the corner of Liberty and Wood, on a bench in front of Heinz Hall, maybe standing behind Jim’s law building, you don’t know him, but it’s the building to the right with the lights on top. It seems I’m caught thinking I’ll run into you though I know you’re gone. Or perhaps you’re a movie cliché, sitting on the stair rail by the door, watching everyone talk around me, watching my eyes well up, since they haven’t numbed my brain with pills yet, for pulling over on the side of the road to cry about books that aren’t that sad. I’m used to silence so I don’t expect anything from you, nothing to make me feel supernatural, but I have to tell you I worry sometimes that maybe you’re like me now, sitting up high, surrounded by strangers, staring at some gray place they’re trying to convince you

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is heaven, and you’re trapped behind a glass wall wanting to say something to a person knowing full well he can’t hear you.

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Frank O’Hara Devastatingly handsome, in my opinion. I bought one of your books just to look at you: frowny lips, sleepy eyes. The kind of guy I’d feel comfortable letting drive. There are less people alive each day who knew you, like there are less people alive each day who love me. Will I ever meet anyone new? I wish you would have gotten up.

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The Story of Your Leaving I call my sister and tell her “Manic Monday” by the Bangles is to be played at my funeral, not that I’m dying, or at least don’t think I am, but a person should think about these things or else you’ll get stuck with a hymn and how can anyone be sad when Susanna Hoffs sings, C’mon, honey, let’s go make some noise? I’ve always been a sucker for a good ending: THE END, a couple smooching behind six overweight letters on a weepy movie screen, my grandmother dying of asthma, saying I can’t talk anymore, meaning today, and me saying I know, meaning never again, my sister throwing a vase through her boyfriend’s windshield, You forgot your fucking flowers, motherfucker! Kevin Costner’s Hey dad, you wanna have a catch? in Field of Dreams, Christ’s It is finished, Cher’s farewell tour, the last chapter of Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love. My friend Laura is afraid she’ll die by being stabbed or choking on a hot dog. Imagine the headline, she says, Girl Chokes on Wiener! Meanwhile, at Taco Bell, I almost told a complete stranger that if I could remember no matter what I do, I will die, then I wouldn’t be so afraid of getting sick. I started a poem with the line: The day we met I began the story of our good-bye. It was too precious, but I liked the idea and tried again: The day we met I began the story of your leaving, but that felt like a Lifetime movie, so I scrapped the poem but did call it quits with the guy I was dating and that became the story and the ending, he didn’t understand, he said I thought things were going fine.

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Music History I can still see Debbie Harry leaning over a stone wall in a city I knew was Paris or Rome or anywhere away from that place in the hills I was sewn to: “The Tide Is High” was the first record I bought with my own money, my allowance stashed in a can beneath the bed where my father used to store his rifles. My music collection grew like a white lie, the splashy covers sliding off shiny discs that were larger versions of buttons I could never fasten. I stacked pennies on the arm to keep the record from skipping while I posed like the Go-Go’s on their water skis: hairbrush a microphone in hand, one foot on a pillow, singing: vacation, had to get away. Or nobody home and music loud enough to hear in the bathroom, I was the “King of Pain” knowing more than anyone what Sting meant because I too was inside the rain of my shower with the circling world running round my brain. Tonight I could go on like this, singing fragments of tunes, a kind of permission for a way to be behind the wooden door of my room. But then I’d have to tell how memory plays those records: the day Steven Combs called me faggot on the bus, and I smuggled dad’s pistol to school to kill him, the day my mother caught me wearing 46

her lipstick and wouldn’t speak to me for weeks, the time Jason told his mom that I made him take his pants down and lie on the ground beside me. I’d rather stay here in the spotlight, in an empty house, with a hairbrush and a box of music, years before the pennies skipped off, the records were scratched and lost, and the world in that room stopped spinning.

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Story I shouldn’t have seen it but I did, through the window: the man dying, or what appeared to be a man dying—nurses circling, frantically, pulling the curtain in the center of the room— so others couldn’t see— but not the one to the street. I shouldn’t have seen it, or rather, didn’t want to: everyone I love that has ever died has done so in a closed-off room, away from the world, away from the noise of a rained-on city street, out of the view of a person walking home with groceries in his hands. The daughter is staring ahead, toward her father’s bed, or who I believe to be the daughter is now resting her chin, calmly, in her hands, she is trying to solve something, get to the bottom of it, one would think, if the constellation of bodies weren’t twirling in such a hurry 48

beside her. Instead she is thinking: How quickly I am made strange. Or more likely she is thinking: is this really happening or yesterday he was fine or the doctor said “probably going home” or who will I call now or how quickly in this life we come to be here. We are eye level, but she doesn’t see me, and I would be ashamed for her to see me seeing her as she sees her father dying. And yet I want to tap the glass, say, you don’t have to be strong, this really should destroy you or love is a burden sometimes, I could have told you. But that is another story, not this story: of a daughter sitting in a room watching her father die— of a stranger stopping to watch through a window.

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Then He never saw me in the parking lot, or if he did he never acknowledged me, and why would he have? I wasn’t different yet, at least not in a way anyone would believe in a town where men didn’t love men or anything more than god and god help anyone who did. I knew I wanted to touch him, or rather my body knew, but could never risk tipping the school into seeing me. Of course, there was a tragedy, the way the beautiful are given back to the stories that made them, quick and perfect like a flash of his hair in the wind. And it’s stupid, predictable—the car, the drunk star athlete dead, leaving his exhausted mother to wander the house at night calling his name: Joe, a word

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that once made him turn, I’m sure, in a way he never turned to me.

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Dr. Engel Studies John Currin’s Paintings For the most part he enjoys them, though he can’t stop the fan belt thought circling the lightly greased machinery of his mind (in an emergency panty hose can replace a fan belt until an Exxon can be found or a BP, or a Chevron, or something small and unnamed if you happen to be driving through, say, West Virginia) that a body couldn’t look like this and survive: misshapen, Kate Moss–thin, breasts swollen and exaggerated like the heads of the baby mice Roger squashed in the garage when they were boys: boys are Dr. Engel’s favorite at least the boys in the last painting on the last page of the book, boating somewhere, bare-assed and happy, bare-assed and bragging about fish in their nets, between their legs, between them: shiny and wet and smelly, healthy.

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The Last Small Thing for Robert Wills (1968–2003)

You had the gayest obituary: graduated from the Pittsburgh Beauty Academy . . . enjoyed dancing and attending Madonna concerts. But it was like you: beautifully inappropriate. I loved seeing you out, wrapped around some manly man, half playing, half wanting this or that man to be your own as he twirled you around the dance floor of Pegasus or Eagle. You weren’t afraid to go anywhere: By god strutting into any South Side bar, plopping yourself down in the middle of all the straight boys, your hair shoulder length and big, full makeup, glittery hair clips. You shopped at Express, a fact we discussed on more than one occasion: A size 3 and goddamn proud of it. All the salesgirls knew you. Once, I asked you if I looked fat and you said, I’m psycho about these things, so I’ll be honest, and then you said, mercifully, No, you look the same as in the picture, the one of me from my thin days you were holding 53

for comparison. I knew then I liked you, having always felt close to those who preface lies with statements like, I never lie or I always tell the truth. And the truth is I should have enjoyed it when you came back last night— everyone knows now the dead are allowed to come back, if they want to, in dreams—but never having been one who enjoys sneaking into movies or speeding, too worried about the consequences, I hardly looked at you: No amount of wishing by the living has ever made it okay for anyone who’s come back to stay. And you didn’t want to stay, the details of your death announcing this. It was a coffee shop, and you were just sitting there: no makeup, hair cut short; we filled the room around you. There was music playing, a song you would never listen to. You seemed to be contemplating something before your face turned to disappointment, as if once again the world of us could not give to you the very thing you needed, the last small thing you’d returned for, and right when you gave up and headed toward the door: 54

Someone said, Be a tree, they are so many kinds of beautiful. Someone said, Be a field. So much love always moving through you. No, someone else said, be an ocean, Robert, be an ocean.

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Late Walking home after a movie I saw someone flip a light on, right there in Union Square in a building I’ve never cared enough to learn the name of someone flipped on a light in the middle of so many lights already burning and I saw and thought: it won’t be so bad to die. A light that had nothing to do with me, maybe a person locking a door before bed or getting up to let a friend in who traveled all day just to get there, or for a glass of water, perhaps, after the panicked dream of the world collapsing, whatever it was I understood for once that the man taking his shirt off across the street didn’t matter, the thrasher kids with Rock’n’ Roll scribbled on their black T-shirts didn’t change a thing, neither did the cluster of lampposts with people leaning, the impatient taxi, pissing dog, crowd moving quickly, crossing toward me.

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Ars Poetica We don’t need more poems about blow jobs, a friend told me recently. There are too many as it is. I said, Do you mean we don’t need more poems by gay men about blow jobs or blow jobs in general? I needed to know if she was anti-gay or anti-penis. Well just because you can talk about something doesn’t mean you should, she said. You should want your poems to be relevant to a larger community. Do you want your writing to be read only by your peers? Or do you want it to last, for people like Billy Collins to read your poems? I said, Well I’m sure if asked, Billy Collins would say he enjoys a good blow job. And that’s my point: poetry is about what happens, regardless of what group is telling it, or at least it used to be. My friend dropped it but still writes dead mother poems because, I guess, we don’t have enough of those. Another friend said a guy told her after a reading he could have done without the graphic depictions of shit in her poems. My friend recently lost her father and was reading about cleaning his body while he was dying. I guess shit can only be in poems now if you’re ironic or a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Because most of the poems out of Iowa these days, she said, are shit. I told her I wouldn’t repeat that. And fat people shouldn’t write about sex, and gay men shouldn’t write about their bodies or childhood or AIDS, and women shouldn’t write about their bodies or their periods or breast cancer, and black people shouldn’t write about discrimination. Straight white men shouldn’t write about baseball (well, actually, that’s true). Latino writers shouldn’t use Spanish words in poems unless they translate them.

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And you should never write a Sharon Olds poem or a Mark Doty poem or a dead mother poem or an incest poem or a poem of witness or a poem about childhood or adulthood or god or death. Never write anything contemporary or confessional or autobiographical or political or direct or clear. And, god forbid, NEVER write anything without at least one classical reference! In short: Never write anything that matters.

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PART III The dream I had that night was similar To an aesthetic of the film—I feared I might be hungry violently for years. Rafael Campo, Diva

Dark, Awful Man I wait spread-eagled on the bed. He sent me to my room to take my clothes off because he wanted to find me naked. I’ve placed a sheet over my cock to tease him as he walks through the door. Were you trying to hide that from me? he smiles, pointing, then pulls the sheet back from my body. I think: if I had a gun I could kill you, if I had a knife I could cut you, and I’m not going to raise my legs up even when you ask: Raise your legs up, he says. And I do. •••

Here is when I want to get out of bed, I tell my therapist who has been sitting in front of me the whole time tapping my knees. The tapping stimulates, at the same time, the right and left sides of my brain, opening nerve passages in the body during memory that will somehow, with her guidance, help me live more fully in the present. How do you feel when you think of getting out of bed? she asks. Like if I can get him off me I won’t have to die. •••

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I hid the lubricant before he came over because I knew he wouldn’t make me do it without, but I forget about the lotion on the desk until right before he sees it. I want to lock his head between my legs, already on his shoulders, and choke him. He says, you’re a handsome, handsome boy, now relax, you’re trembling, relax, smearing lotion on my ass, up and down the crack until it feels like I shit, like I need a diaper. My mother bought me these sheets, I think. If I come we can stop. He circles my anus, smiling, what a beautiful ass, he says, now relax. I take deep breaths, wonder if I could love him. •••

I don’t tell him it burns, I hate it, I hate him, I’m afraid of him and want him to leave. I say, teach me how to be fucked, and he groans, I will my sweet, sweet boy. Now play with your dick, Aaron, play with your dick. And I do: If I come we can quit. He moves faster inside me. •••

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Does he know you feel like this? Would you tell him? my therapist asks. He knows I’m uncomfortable with sex, I say. I’ve never told him to what extent, and he doesn’t push me, but I want to do these things for him because he does so much for me in bed. It’s always for me. I’m embarrassed to tell her I feel obligated, I’ve never really looked at his penis, that once I told him I wanted to stop, and he said you’re just nervous and kept going. If my women friends said this, I would lecture them about controlling their own bodies, not doing what makes them uncomfortable, but I feel like it’s different between men. •••

What Brian says:

I can’t believe you don’t like sex I love it. Are you sure you’re gay?

•••

What my therapist says: I want you to imagine getting out of bed and what happens in your mind when you do. She continues tapping my knees: •••

I get out of bed and put my clothes on. It’s important I put my clothes on. I move to the corner of the room. He’s still in bed watching me. I want to leave the room, but I can’t. I want to walk out to the yellow summer street, get in my car and leave, but I can’t. 63

I think about my mother. It’s the house of my childhood: I’m in the basement (but still in the room) watching television. There are test tubes of blood, a doctor examining a man. Something under a microscope enlarged like a stain. My mother on the stairs, me telling her about the disease I’ve just heard about: Queers get that. Bad people, she says. My mother’s in the room, in the room with us now. •••

I stop my therapist to tell her this isn’t going anywhere, that it’s not difficult to see that the exchange with my mother makes me think every man I sleep with will give me AIDS. I’ve thought about this before. This isn’t working. If you understand that, Aaron, then why are you still trying to leave the room instead of making your mother leave? •••

Tonight, thank god, it’s just his fingers inside me moving faster, harder while I stroke myself. (If I come we can stop) Do you want me to come? I ask. Do you want to? If you want me to. •••

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In my head I imagine he sees her from the bed, my mother standing in the other corner of the room. I see us as points on a triangle, can see the energy moving through us. She looks at him, then at me. He looks at her, then at me. Nice to finally meet you. •••

What happens if I decide I don’t like anal sex, or sex at all, for that matter? Where does that leave me as a gay man? Where is there to go from here? My therapist listens, nods, doesn’t say anything. Maybe she wants me to find it on my own. Maybe there is nothing to say. •••

What Laura says: Why do you think so many women fake orgasm? •••

We lie there staring at the books on the shelf above my door, the miniature lighthouse on the end, the cord running down the wall to where it plugs in. My mother got it for me, I tell him when he asks. Are you close? •••

My therapist asks what I’m thinking.

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I don’t tell her that sometimes I still worry there’s a hell I’ll go to, that for days after sex my insides hurt, that sitting here in this chair I can honestly say I never want to touch a man again.

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Dr. Engel Interprets Rothko’s Blue, Green, Blue on Blue Ground Blue bruise of that first fall off the fourth grade slide and the blood that he heard was blue in his body. Once, he watched Colby finger Tonia and she lifted for him, blue and slick between her legs spread for him, licking his fingers slippery, sliding up the front of her green skirt and she let him. Oh christ •••

in a manger with a blue bulb screwed in his back, his ceramic skin holy-blue like pillows and worry, like candles in his grandmother’s window and a ceramic angel hovering like a piss-fly over straw and baby-god and all the wise men blue and crowding in for tickets to a winter blockbuster •••

and Dr. Engel’s grandmother running a bright-light sweeper around the mini-manger leaving marks on the green-rug ground and saints fallen in her earthquake. Blue•••

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green veins of his grandmother’s legs, blue breath of her snoring, cheap lids blue with her blinking, blue death, blue body of her beautiful beautiful wheezing.

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Dear Matt Damon smug in your T-shirt smug in your jeans smug in the white socks teething your ankles. Do you ever get pimples on your butt? a stray hair in your ear? an inappropriate erection? Dear Matt Damon of the Crest-white grin: I met a guy, you and he were buds, best friends when kids, you lived upstairs and had birthday parties. I know he was lying. I know he had very bad teeth. Dear Matt Damon of damaged kidneys. Dear Matt Damon of the million-dollar loft, ex of Winona drugged up and thieving. Dear Matt Damon of math equations. Dear Matt Damon American story. Dear Matt Damon thinker and number taker, if I gave you my number would you call? Dear Matt Damon pusher of skin, thin and naked, naked and wet, naked and filming, dropping your towel bending over. Dirty Matt Damon with a dirty-boy smirk, jerk-off Matt, spread-legs Matt, Matthew on a bathroom floor. Hairless and bulging, bulging and salty, slutty-boy, door-Matt of my soul.

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The Trick Did Isaac think Abraham was taking him hunting, fishing, to have the talk? Imagine how scary for your very own father to grab you from behind by the nape, by the hair, by the ear, the elbow, to have your clothes ripped off, your favorite sweatshirt ruined. Until then you had only been naked in front of him in the bathroom where you showered together, where he taught you how to wipe, to tap it twice after peeing. So you see it was no big deal— the unanswered questions, the days cutting wood, pulling rocks from the stream, going deeper, working harder for the largest, flattest, prettiest stones. You thought: sidewalk, thought: chimney, thought: a wall you could play on, sit on top of with your friends.

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You never expected those stones you carried, that chore that callused your hands would build the place where he would lay you down to sleep like the prayer you sometimes said together. And even though a mood swing miracle made him change his mind, put away his knife, wrap you in the camouflage coat he’d been wearing, when you finally made it home, you never said another word, never left your room at night, looked anyone in the eye at dinner, or believed prayer to be more than chance, a ram in a thicket crying.

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Explanation Even at the end he wanted things, a drink of water, his bed by the window, and when the last pain made him delirious, he begged for someone to hold his feet, please hold my feet, and we did until his spirit or whatever unraveled itself from the mess the cancer had left and who hasn’t wanted something unexplainable and strange? •••

What surprised me is that we stopped and held each other, the three of us, clothing half pulled off, sticking to our lit-up bodies, our cocks straight up like dogs stretching for table scraps, nobody saying anything, like we knew each other beyond the moment’s fingers, curtain to the front of the bar waving back and forth, back and forth, light from the other world slipping in. •••

For years I was afraid to eat in front of strangers, at parties and small gatherings. No thank you. I’m full. I ate before I came. •••

Maybe because the first time I notice the hair on my legs my mother yells at me for being afraid of a ball, for only playing with girls. For something she is sure will end the world and then she feels guilty, sits down beside me on the basement couch, her leg touches my leg, my fine brown hairs against her smooth mother-legs, my father walks in. Oh nothing, she says, he’s fine. Maybe because in the car she raises my arm up and says I want to see if you have hair.

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I hide the note about sex education in the papers I bring home and she finds it in the stack of A’s, takes it, never says a word. Maybe because silence fills throats and pockets, rooms and hallways, isn’t nothing, maybe. •••

I couldn’t believe what we’d done to each other, ugly positions, contorted groans. With the blankets kicked off our bodies, I thought about men who rape women in public, men who rape women in front of audiences, and there we were, two men who wanted each other, who lay down willingly in the violence between us. •••

I’m terrible at one-night stands. I get nervous, afraid of the man, the way need changes him, makes him ugly, the way he wants me.

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Snow Snow falls from heaven like little pieces of paper, and I imagine God ripping up the Lamb’s Book. No one meets His impossible standard. The spoiled Savior is screaming: Not this time, Dad! You made it! You broke it! You fix it! Heaven roars like a teenager who wants the car for an evening and can’t have it, the daughter not allowed to get her ears pierced. The angels crowd in an orgy of wings to listen: Now who will save the queers, the whores, the people named Bob who say Goddammit?

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Things I Could Never Tell My Mother I read Playgirl. I go to gay bars. The eye shadow you found cleaning under the bed was mine. I stole it from Jessica and put it on. The kids at school called me faggot. They were right. I’ve smoked pot. I’ve driven drunk and even hit a car without getting the license number—twice. All of my friends are gay, too, even Brian. I’ve kissed him. I smoke. I started swearing in third grade. I seduced my college chapel choir director. I masturbated in your kitchen. I tried on your high heels and your nightgowns. I looked at male underwear ads in the Sears catalog. I did drag shows for my second-grade class and only played with the girls. That was why I was nervous when we saw my teacher in town. I think about if you’ve ever gone down on dad. When grandpa was sick, I never prayed for him because I did not believe. I party with drag queens. I lie about being too busy to come home; I just don’t want to. I wiped the booger on the wall. I remember when you told me to get AIDS and die, that if I were gay you’d never want to see me again. I remember you saying you wish you’d never had me because I was so unhappy. I’ve almost killed myself. I don’t answer the phone on Sundays because I know you’re calling. 75

I don’t like your brother. I hate your church. I hate your God. I hate the shame you taught me and that I’m too afraid to show you this.

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Sightings —Click on the picture to zoom in on Jesus

Christ in black lines that appear to be moving Christ carved in ivory on the panels of a triptych Christ clean shaven with a cross as a staff Christ as mosaic Christ as metal Christ in wood Christ on a T-shirt at Urban Outfitters Christ in paint being arrested Christ half naked and beaten Christ all muscles and moaning Christ in marble in the arms of his mother Christ as a baby Christ as a teacher Christ as a waiter at TGI Friday’s Christ smooth skinned with a perfect perm Christ in urine Christ in soap Christ on a cross Christ on a cross Christ on a postcard Christ on a spring Christ in a taco Christ in cream cheese Christ on Broadway Christ with James Dean Christ

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Poem for the End of Summer I suppose I should like the shininess of it all, a piece of the night skyline pinched off and smeared between these walls, glinting in the framed-in glass of pictures— Do you see what I see? Standing on Brian’s balcony I stare at the sequined dress in front of me: Pittsburgh, this place I’ve learned to call my whatever I needed at the time. I turn and see Brian framed in the sky, poised in summer’s last syllable, leaning into the city, and for the first time I see him as he is: a man suspended, balanced above blazing uncertainties. I think of Josh then Matt, Tim and Derek, and Tommy and as far as I know they’re living. Don’t die, Don’t ever die, I whisper as if they can hear.

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Dr. Engel Passes a Generically Attractive Couple on Avenue A and considers the way their bodies fit together like a jigsaw puzzle was the way the nurse described it to him in middle school, the middle of the man and the middle of the woman sliding together, sliding together, sliding together, locked the way his father told him dogs lock and you have to throw water on two dogs locked though nobody Dr. Engel suspects really knows if that’s true, but more importantly he hears the man say, I want to get away and sit by a body of water today, with the option of cooling off, and Dr. Engel resists the urge, like the urge to pee, to tell the man that his body is mostly water, is in a sense a body of water (50 to 65 percent water

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in adults, 75 percent in children) and that the kidneys weigh approximately 5 ounces each, each of them, the man and the woman, having two, probably, and maybe explaining our need for love, for coupling, why everything happens in twos, except for tragedies which mostly, everyone knows, happen in threes.

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What’s Required Hunting taught me early to walk at least three paces behind my father to stop vines and branches from smacking me. We looked like an animal with its young: the big one, the little one, the same. My father taking long, quick strides, leaving me behind in brush, fighting to free myself from thorns. When we came home he had me strip so he could search my body for ticks that hid like secrets I learned to keep from him, the boys on the bus calling me sissy! In gym class I was faggot! pussy! I killed a deer, arrow cutting clean through its heart and lungs, a quick flinch, a few steps back, then a glazed blackness in its eyes. I’ll never forget my father’s face that day: chapped smile, brown eyes soft as soil. He pulled me close, half hugging as men do. For men this is what’s required, some sort of bloodshed, a tearing down.

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After Coming Out to My Sister I thought of the day she tossed a board in the air like a baton, and the wooden chunk hung several perfect seconds then fell the sharp distance down on her head. I was on the front porch with a new bag of cowboys, building fences, setting up plastic troughs and horses when dad found her lying, knees bent in sit-up position, blood running down her pudgy flesh like caramel on an apple, like icing that dripped to the center of the cake we poked holes in. He was the fireman in the school filmstrip carrying the girl who waited properly by her window. Get your mother! Get in the car! Now! My sister twitched and hollered all the way to the hospital while my parents argued about who left the board on the ground. I counted breaths: my chest up, down, up then down. She just needed stitches, a shiny, shaved patch until the hair grew back— We had ice cream cones, my sister’s dipped in chocolate, and when we got home my toys were gone, mysteriously, the porch swept clean.

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After-School Special I am seven and flipping through channels trying to see men with their shirts off. I love soap operas, ache for my favorites to peel out of their shirts. I know the scenarios by heart: a woman spills coffee on a man and off comes his shirt so she can wash it, or maybe he’s doing something manly with a hammer, decides to work bare back. I can always tell when there’s going to be a love scene by how many shirts the man is wearing: an undershirt beneath a sweater, no love scene, too many shirts to take off, too sloppy, and sex on television is never sloppy, but a single button-up shirt means I’ll see chest, nipples, rippled stomach. I hang on every turn of the woman’s wrist pulling each button through its opening. After General Hospital I search through Montgomery Ward and Sears mail-order catalogs for the man who models both underwear and suits. I find him posed in a suit then quickly flip to a picture of him in bikini briefs sitting on a stool. He’s perfect: broad shoulders, solid chest, flocks of hair under each arm, cut calves, a jaw carved out of stone. I can’t resist him. I put my mouth on the page every time.

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Dr. Engel Teaches the Poet How to Swim At first the Poet won’t take his shirt off, undress in front of the knowledge of right and wrong and so much for so long has been wrong. Dr. Engel assures the Poet his body is one big elbow to him, that every guy swims with his shirt off, and off the shirt, with more coaxing, comes. The Poet trembles. Good boy, says Dr. Engel. The Poet covers his chest as if he has breasts, as if to say, I can’t give you everything. Dr. Engel grabs his hands, peels them back like stickers, as if to say, I wasn’t asking, and leads the Poet down the bank, over grass slippery and shiny as wet hair, mud like dough between their toes, rocks jabbing the soft of their feet as water rises. The Poet is afraid of the water. Let go of my hand and lay back. I can’t, says the Poet his fear floating up and he thinks of water

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in his ears, the sound of death, a possible infection. I won’t let you sink, says Dr. Engel. I’ll write prescriptions! And half abandoning himself to loss of life, of body, of being not seen, the Poet falls back and with his palms on the small of the Poet’s back Dr. Engel holds him, like a trophy after a sporting event, like jesus holding a lamb in a tacky church painting. Steadily, lovingly, eternally, as if to say, I’ll take all your loneliness away, as if to say, I’ll never let go, before, without warning, he does.

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Learning the Body I couldn’t believe there were openings in the body that people actually locked parts of their own bodies into: a penis or tongue pushing in to what I learned was someone’s vagina, a finger slipping in and in to an anus. I helped my father gut a deer once and was shocked how warm the inside was, the blood not gushing, but pouring like motor oil slowly over the fur, steam rising from organs I’d seen pictures of in health class— but duller, grayer than the red heart on the pull-down chart of the human: blue lungs, green gall bladder—the care I took sliding hands inside, lifting the deer’s stomach up to my chest like an infant. The intestines uncurled like vacuum cleaner hose, and we left everything there in the leaves. The camera zooms in on a man’s ass in videos I’ve seen of men fucking, while another man kneels at the edge of a bed 86

or table, licks, spreads the hole, more and more fingers inserted with each entering until the muscles give, and I’m shocked by sex even now, how the body can not only open itself to such blatant tenderness, but can also want it.

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Notes Composed on a Sidewalk The sidewalks are wet like tongues And as dirty: Today on the train I heard a man say, The fear in a woman’s eyes is what makes him Come. I don’t know anything. Everyone I love is sad. A dog squats to Shit by my feet; a parent jerks a child Away from a window. This slick new World he’s stretching for still one big no. The pharmacy is lonely on Fifth: Stretched-out and yawning, plants Dangling from the awning. A woman Sprints for the bus. I want to be a different Person. Beneath our feet men hammer The one true story of our lives. Someone knows each of their names. Someone is putting the world back together.

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NOTES

“Jockstrap” is for Jan Beatty. “Boston (I’ve been meaning . . .)” borrows from and is influenced by Maggie Anderson’s poem “Something.” In “The Signs of Choking” the italicized portions are from the New York City Department of Health “Choking Victim” poster. “Boston (Through the window . . .)” is for P.C. The title of “New Zealand Hand Model Stuart Poses with Kiwifruit and Has a Foot Fetish (notes from an interview)” is taken from the title of an interview in Butt magazine. The facts about kiwifruit are from the California Kiwifruit Commission. Except where cited, the rest of the quotes are fictional. The Stuart depicted in the poem is fictional and should not be associated with the actual subject of the article. “Dear Matt Damon” is for Nancy Krygowski. “Notes Composed on a Sidewalk” borrows its title from a poem by Delilah Caldwell of the same name. It also adopts a line from Marie Howe’s poem “Prayer.” The Dr. Engel poems are not based on any actual person living or dead.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems previously appeared (sometimes in different versions): Bloom (“Dark, Awful Man”); 5 AM (“First Night in the City,” “Learning the Body,” “Notes Composed on a Sidewalk,” “Sightings,” “The Last Small Thing,” “Things I Could Never Tell My Mother”); Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide (“Clarification”); Gulfstream!ng (“Explanation,” “How Easily He Moves,” “New Zealand Hand Model Stuart Poses with Kiwifruit and Has a Foot Fetish [notes from an interview]”); Kestrel (“Taking Off from the Airport / Cleveland, Ohio”); Pearl (“Jockstrap”); Pittsburgh City Paper (“Poem for the End of Summer”); Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing (“Boston [Through the window . . .],” “Story”); Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (“Silent Room”); Poets.org / Academy of American Poets (“Boston [I’ve been meaning . . .]”); Prairie Schooner (“Notes Composed in a Heat Wave,” “Secrets of an Identity Thief,” “The Signs of Choking”); Puerto del Sol (“After-School Special”); Rivendell (“Then,” “What’s Required”); 7 Carmine (“Boston [I’ve been meaning . . .],” “What’s Required,” “Then,” “Prayer for a Doctor”). The following poems appeared in the collection What’s Required (Thorngate Road), winner of the 2003 Frank O’Hara Award chapbook competition: “What’s Required,” “Working Out with the Boys,” “The Story of Your Leaving,” “Keep Him There,” “Wreckage,” “Boston (I’ve been meaning . . .),” “After Coming Out to My Sister,” “Snow,” “Music History,” “Then,” “Cher Uncensored,” “Valedictory,” “Poem for the End of Summer,” “Learning the Body.” “Taking Off from the Airport / Cleveland, Ohio” received a 1998 Kestrel Poetry Prize. “Poem for the End of Summer” received an Academy of American Poets Prize. Thanks to Vermont Studio Center for space, where some of these poems were written. Thanks to my teachers, friends, and family for their help and support.

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