—Hackensack, NJ 1974
I should have hated those winters. I should have known
each day’s dope cast a freeze over figuring what’s next.
I’m still sickened at the black-light mauve we painted
the living room, how it spread a shroud over our talk
the instant we entered, slush refreezing on the stoop.
I should have hated the long scar sideswiped into our Ford
by some hit-and-run drunk. I should have hated the mid-
afternoon bile-black sky over Packard’s as the string
of fat lights would flicker and start to fail one by one. Why
didn’t I sing goodbye years before? How often did I want
the buried core of your hopes to be mine? Every
other ice-hard morning before work we were on line
for a quarter tank at the Esso station on Route 4. Nixon
declared daylight savings early that year, as if the raw face
of the city needed more daylight to show itself off…
I should have hated the stoned laughs, the stoned parties
with alien friends dribbling half-eaten sentences like nonsense
koans. Remember how doe-eyed Dawn and her mute guy
spent whole days rereading the first pages of Fariña, then
forgot every word? But you were willing to wait out the cold
with me, shotgunning dense bursts of weed down my throat.
Then the sex, as if prophesying a future beyond the quixotic.
Once you laughed in tears as we bolted your Toklas brownies
on the waterbed, then rode the waves above the undeclared
question I’d turn from as it worried your sleeping face.
In my ripped daze, it’s not hard to believe I read Miller
after Rich after de Chardin. Paradisal California seemed
a compass setting in a no-go future. Instead we roamed
the squat Ramapo Mountains, where I saw myself
shouldering ahead heroically on my own—and once more
I tried to blink away words I hadn’t yet said to you.
When the packed car groaned the shocks low and at last
we chased Route 80 west into the final trip we’d take
together, you stared hard at the same sun rising that day
years back when we pulled off the Turnpike and the city
screeched open its ferrous arms. I’d crunched to a stop
in front of the clapboard two-story on Prospect, and you
reached for me, the heat of your hand flaring my own.
Some days now it’s a weighty unravelment, a thin tinnitus,
soon followed by the memory of one gesture: My hand,
that unrelated coward, choosing to return the heat
of your grip, a clenching you chose to read as promise.
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