“My Dance Is My Body, My God Is My Own”

 (to L.D. 1954 – 1990)

 

1

 I drink too much these days, L.D.

 You were long since gone when

self-medication became a good idea.

 

And I got a regular job too, L.D.

You would be disappointed by the news

while my family is finally relieved.

 

I sometimes see you, morning or night,

in your rooms that smelled the smell of man loneliness.

And we walking the dark streets talking the open talk.

 

You are the only man I've ever kept after, L.D.

The only man I've thought worth

the time it takes to chase a man down.

 

This was all years ago and you checked out.

Tonight I got here shifts in green breeze.

What do you mean by coming back this way?

 

What do you want here, dead friend?

Sometimes I see you in my daughter's arms 

and she is your Madonna, more like your pieta.
 

All dead young men should get such a reception.

Only, you were her friend too soon to leave.
 

I think she remembers you, L.D.

I think she sometimes thinks of me.
 

I didn't know you were in my wife's bed that night.

Man, except to see to my daughter, I would have cleared the scene.

You didn't stick around to explain and I got two losses, every year,

to explain to myself in new green:
 

You and my daughter

Maybe inside our mother's womb, and she

the layer out who takes all men up at death,

maybe there you've heard the report too.
 

So many towns we had entered by then.

So many roads we had travelled

just to realize all roads bring a man

back around to the beginning again.

And there we were at the crossroad where

criminals and poets sport in crucifixion.

Word is we gave each other a beating that night.
 

The night was moonless, man, and so were we, right?

Maybe all men are moonless in nature.

But I don't think so. I think the moon has sons

like loons on a lake, like you in your body’s beauty.

 

The way you pushed against me in your salmon leap

I knew you had gone berserker. I knew I had one chance.

Your body built to dance the weight of the world.

My body built to dance the weight of nothings.

One chance. One chance. One chance.

 

L.D., I want to take back my fist slam in your face.

I want to take back that moonless night.

 

You melted in my arms like a lover does.

I hugged you in your body like a mother does.

Chartres Street was different in our day

as was Jackson Square and the Cafe du Monde.

Bourbon Street keeps the same, but then

a town’s sex machine always keeps the same.

 

Charlottesville has prettified herself, man.

Jefferson's bookstore, where we met, is gone.

The graveyards we tripped through late at night 

no longer allow a poet the easy access.

 

Providence's Thayer Street would not allow

the likes of you or me on the hill anymore.

 

Philadelphia was hard on you, with every letter

the message of outcast hardness came through.

 

You are the best poet I've ever known. What I mean

is that you are the most lover of poetry I've ever known.

 

So why the final destination?

Why NYC, the town that did you in.

The Ozark cluster of crystal quartz

is still on my altar, man. By hand

you chiseled it out of your cave’s floor.

 

Memory is sometimes a death wish.

 

The music you put to

my songs made you into

a song singing down the hall.

 

I think you romanced the death wish.

 

Your guitar was overwhelming

in close space and intimate room.

Medial women answered to you.

 

Young men too, too much sometimes

seduce the death wish.

As do some medial women.

L.D., I can't remember if we had this conversation about two ancient and famous friends working in Latin poetry. I do remember I discovered the stories when you and I were street whores, before your wives and family made you into something immaculate. Seriously. Did we talk about the Roman patrician, Ausonius, and his friend, Paulinus of Nola who Ausonius, a devout man and a Pagan, lost to the subversive love of Christ?

 Maybe we never talked about the friendship. Maybe we didn’t need to talk about friendship. But I remember clearly the day we were together and I found the poetry collection carrying the tale of ancient friendship. And of ancient friendship’s loss. It was in Portuguese town, near the docks, in Providence and we were there together in that used book store. I remember as clearly too how steeped we were in the Carmina Burana songs telling tales on vagabond scholars, poets, and itinerants working in late Latin lyric.

 Ausonius was landed gentry, a Roman patrician who held property in Bordeaux. You never cared about such things but he planted a vineyard still under till. Paulinus got caught up in the new, religious fervor, refused his friends, sold off his property, and finally became a bishop or an abbot or something like that.

 So much holiness in Paulinus' election. But for what? This is my question tonight, L.D. For what is holiness worth? And why do I have to carry your Christ love for sacrifice? Why can't you leave me to Ausonius' love of the vineyard, of Bordeaux, and of friendship?

"I have my books

 and my poetry

to protect me."

--Paul Simon

 

L.D., man, I got to tell a story on you.

Sunday afternoon here and I am late

for a most important date

with the queen of the Laundromat.

 

I've never known a man as much in love

with books the way you were. No joke.

Back then, of course, books were not so expensive.

This was before the Reagan years, before he

started the tax on publishers on their back list inventories.

Maybe you've had reason where you are now

to reflect upon what enemies to civ. Republicans can be.

 

I damn near coveted the books you bought.

In your rooms, on your tables, there were your books.

And they were always essential, sexy, your books.

You were into the great souls and thinkers and into

artists only who change a moment's vector.

 

We met in a bookstore and god damn you loved to hold a book.

I would see you down in the basement and you

taking in the book smell as if it was your oxygen.

Someday I need to tell you about the fire

an embarrassed accountant started, down in your basement.

She was fucking the manager. She destroyed so many of your books.

Her embarrassment was due to her bad math.

Her consequence involved an audit.

 

Then up in Providence what do you find but a bookstore job.

A mail order outfit and there you are boxing up books

like some kind of Hermes, some kind of messenger between gods and people,

boxing up communiqués. And I bet the delivery was tender.

 

Your last job I know about was in NYC. NYC. NYC.

A burg I've not put foot into since you died.

And your job was with another book dealer.

And why did you love books the way some men love money or power?

 

L.D., I am to the punch line.

It involves a question I never asked you,

never wanting to embarrass you.

You never read the books you bought or mailed out tenderly.

You never read more than a few pages or a chapter.

And this has always puzzled me!

And I am still trying to figure out the message.

 

I don't know, man. Maybe Hermes

sees his job differently.

Maybe the delivery is what matters to him most.

[the rest of the month-long series pending Mom's coding it into HTML...]

 

8.

It is the graveyard talk I remember tonight, if not as late as then.

 

It is as if we were looking to raise the dead.

And isn't that what poets do, L.D.:

 

looking for commerce with the dead, the unborn,

and the not yet born?

 

Thinking of you makes me think of things

both dead and not yet born.

 

Isn't that why you put Yeats to music?

I think you fell in love with Crazy Jane that year.

And the commerce.

Isn't that why you put Joyce’s poems to music?

Still the transactions.

I think you fell in love with chamber music that year.

What was it we once talked about? How Joyce took Yeats to task

for addressing beauty from the past when he himself

wanted to speak to beauties not yet born.

I think we agreed they were both right, yes?

 

You were not like any other graveyard robber I've met.

What in hell or heaven were we looking for among the dead?

You could walk through like a cat parsing his steps.

You could walk through step-still and certain.

You could walk through like a mother black vulture for whom

the dead are baby fresh and darlings to her.

 

I remember our graveyard, late city night and city park walks.

I remember all of my questions.

I remember you never seemed to have any.

I can't remember your answers, unless

the long drag on a cigarette was your answer.

 

L.D., I can't shake your memory, can't slake

each day and each late night of our scansions.

You knew something about the dead and the not yet born

I didn't and still don't.

Maybe it had to do with the commerce.

9

Man, this is going to read like a grade "B" movie

 

whose last cut scene’s actor has no talent for delivering lines.

 

God damn but we were young Turks then.

You, me, the Virginian and Red.

And C’Ville was our camp town.

And we didn't care who approved us.

And we had hunger in our bellies.

 

You were the slender one, you in your lyrical soul.

Red was the honest one for whom word

must match to truth or meet the guillotine

(you do remember his love of things French).

The Virginian, always impeccable, slightly patrician, in inflexion,

who we all slightly deferred to and who you once said

was the best one among us.

And then me. The sorry assed Cracker drop out.

 

There were four of us, L.D. And that town

in the Blue Ridge foothills was where we convened

in high feast fashion when grail quest gets presented

in the Fisher King’s chancy spring.

My God but I never thought the friendships would end.

Or that the hankering after poetry could get cancelled out.

I never thought we wouldn't meet again,

year after year at feast time when friends

come back together, give their reports and forward intelligence

on sudden valleys, asphalt, sacred enclosures, and

grail quest. But it happened.

 

The Virginian I lost first. It might have had to do

with his wife and it might have had to do with mine.

Either way you were right. He was the best of us.

Mostly I think he got lost to poetry, wanting instead a regular life.

Red, the last I heard of Red, he was in a Russian

(Soviet) plane flying out of Africa with his teenage wife.

I miss that small man who had the courage of a century of warriors.

I got his play written in his hand about the Albigensian Crusade

(you do remember his love of things French).

Then you were gone. Your going did collateral damage on us all.

Damn it, L.D. and I am sorry for saying so, but

dying from melanoma at your age amounted to bad taste.

 

I am left. And I am no Percival. Not even close.

The body is wearing down, weights get heavier,

women no longer find me pretty the way they once found us.

And I am not even sure what the right questions are anymore.

 

I envy all of you, L.D. I just can't let go

of what we all agreed upon.

10

L.D., there is this starkness between you and me.

 

 

It is past posture, past text, past scenery.

 

You are the only man, before or since, who loved me;

in brilliant sunlight and in black night you loved me.

 

I failed you, man. I should have been the better friend

than the friend I was in the days of our undoing.

 

It isn't that you gave of yourself too much, but you did.

It isn't that I asked of you too much, but I did.

 

It is that you grounded me in the way no man or woman has.

It's why my wives were jealous of you in Solomon fashion.

 

I think you didn’t know how much I needed you.

Men never say to each other how much they need each other.

 

You are a dead man tonight and I am not sure

how alive I’ve been since your friendship.