Seniors

William cut a hole in his Levi’s pocket

so he could flop himself out in class

behind the girls so the other guys

could see and shit what guts we all said.

All Konga wanted to do over and over

was the rubber band trick, but he showed

everyone how, so nobody wanted to see

anymore and one day he cried, just cried

until his parents took him away forever.

Maya had a Hotpoint refrigerator standing

in his living room, just for his family to show

anybody who came that they could afford it.

Me, I got a French kiss, finally, in the catholic

darkness, my tongue’s farthest half vacationing

loudly in another mouth like a man in Bermudas,

and my body jumped against a flagstone wall,

I could feel it through her thin, almost

nonexistent body: I had, at that moment, that moment,

a hot girl on a summer night, the best of all

the things we tried to do. Well, she

let me kiss her, anyway, all over.

Or it was just a flagstone wall

with a flaw in the stone, an understanding cavity

for burning young men with smooth dreams—

the true circumstance is gone, the true

circumstances about us all then

are gone. But when I kissed her, all water,

she would close her eyes, and they into somewhere

would disappear. Whether she was there

or not, I remember her, clearly, and she moves

around the room, sometimes, until I sleep.

I have lain on the desert in watch

low in the back of a pick-up truck

for nothing in particular, for stars, for

the things behind stars, and nothing comes

more than the moment: always now, here in a truck,

the moment again to dream of making love and sweat,

this time to a woman, or even to all of them

in some allowable way, to those boys, then,

who couldn’t cry, to the girls before they were

women, to friends, me on my back, the sky over me

pressing its simple weight into her body

on me, into the bodies of them all, on me.

Source: Five Indiscretions (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1985)