Today's Sermon

Brady Street, San Francisco

for Roberto Muñoz

The apartment

is still standing, still about to fall.

It's circled now in Technicolors of

competing graffiti

more artful than we were to

stay in love.

Our names in cement are long gone.

It's my first time back since the news.

From the street

nothing seems to have changed.

My mind too has trapped the action in mid-flight:

how I hid in the closet (naked) the

first morning your family descended unannounced

and told your father we'd had

balls for breakfast when my Spanish slipped on

eggs.  You shot your

one-note nasal laugh and spun on your heel,

but I'd cracked the shell of tension.

You mother sat on the couch--

a miniature goddess of plenty, her feet

not touching the floor--and adopting meå

in her knowing smile.

Here's a junk drawer more of memories:

an orange cat that lived through an air-shaft fall;

the Twin Peaks fog from our bedroom window bay;

snacking on Stevie Wonder and your skin;

the double mattress we had to carry home

on our backs because

it cost every cent we'd saved.

After the first fight over nothing you

slammed into the street.  I screamed

from the third floor into the dark I'd

die if

you didn't love me; you cried and

crept back up the stairs creak by

indolent creak.

We stayed together.

That time.

And when the loving was over--

three years, two apartments,

and a continent later--

no one died.  Not

altogether.  At least not

right away.

We left behind the odor of queers in the carpet,

the grease from our last

cooked meal,

a hole I punched in the plaster with my anger

and covered with the Desiderata so

the landlord wouldn't howl.

You see, it only takes a score of years

to make the bitter memories sweet,

like lemons in a sugar glaze.

I'd eat an orchard of them for you now

if you could be alive again to see me try.

~ Michael Lassell, 1947 -