#17

At dinner, two nights ago, with Matt: You were, you said, a calculated disaster. Language like debt, a bike ride through August in crowds, the smell of sex in cellars without you. You could, you said, hardly speak, except in portents, the nightly news. The turn of profit. Always the bankroll to my Cassandra. A tiger poised. The leash you did not see, you said, was knowledge.

Ah, how I heard it though, the snap of your heart at midnight as your cock slid into me then, your lover above me with lust on his tongue. Frenzy. Your accent never quizzacle. The moonlight, caustic through the blinds. What you had mortgaged ease. I bore with my own tears, a murdered doppleganger, legs up in flowers. A mirror with my quiver, quivering cold. Nights with you so dark I saw nothing, and rejoiced.

Now you are, you said, to Matt over dessert, another kind of gap. Too sorry to order backwards. And Josh, just a boy, plain and simple, whom you loved. More fragile now, with wine. Translating. The interrogative. Another man, without salve, save for taciturn. And you stutter. And you wince. And all the moments of the past two years rise up in adumbration: some non-phenomenon you could not bear witness to. I am, you said to Matt, getting better, I think, slowly.

And Matt, dressed in flashing smile, oregano laugh bubbling, told all of this to me. Half hearted, without weight. His own turn, turning him dizzy. Out the door. As I imagine you crying, and am proud. You now like a poem I wrote in possession but never handed to you. "Linger in front of open windows," I wrote. Let your heart throw itself in despair.