Of the Poet’s Youth

When the man behind the counter said, “You pay

by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all?

Ah, Sandy, you were clearly the deluxe doll, modish and pert

in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days,

where you bobbed in the doorway of our dishabille apartment,

a block downwind from the stockyards. Holding court on

the corroded balcony, K. and I passed hash brownies, collecting

change for the building’s monthly pool to predict which balcony

would fall off next. That’s when K. was fucking M. and M. was

fucking J., and even B. and I threw down once on the glass-speckled

lawn, adrift in the headlights of his El Camino. Those were immortal

times, Sandy! Coke wasn’t addictive yet, condoms prevented herpes

and men were only a form of practice for the Russian novel

we foolishly hoped our lives would become. Now it’s a Friday night,

sixteen years from there. Don’t the best characters know better

than to live too long? My estranged husband house-sits for a spoiled

cockatoo while saving to buy his own place. My lover’s gone back

to his gin and the farm-team fiancée he keeps in New York.

What else to do but read Frank O’Hara to my tired three-year-old?

When I put him to bed, he mutters “more sorry” as he turns into sleep.

Tonight, I find you in a box I once marked “The Past.” Well,

therapy’s good for some things, Sandy, but who’d want to forgive

a girl like that? Frank says Destroy yourself if you don’t know!

Deflated, you’re simply the smile that surrounds a hole.

I don’t know anything.

Source: Black Box (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)