Sunday, November 09, 2014

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 - 

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