The Negative

Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures

in sex clubs it wasn't the whys and wherefores

but technical details, like going rafting

down the Colorado River; and when he wrote

about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience

was with his stepfather, the friend told him

it wasn't weird, but the best possible thing

that could have happened . . . I saw then that God,

who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart

as a negative: that the negative had been developed

into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky

on a day so clear he sees through the mountain's shadows

to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it—

a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses

jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting

and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes

that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain

as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids

of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing

for what you want, depending on the equipment,

the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek

of come. . . . And my pal the poet, who believed

in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind

of "spooky action at a distance," he communed

with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter

who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles

where he hides himself away—his sanctuary

Asshole Alley where God's own unholy loves

bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears—

and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred

the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem

that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . .

—That was how it was in those days, back when my friend

hadn't yet met the coroner who wrote down

his cause of death as "polysubstance abuse"

that brought on his heart attack while fucking . . .

And regardless if I believed, whenever

we were together God shone clearer—

those were the days when every morning God woke up

in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night

in divine rage. Whoever loved him,

he loved. Whoever hated him,

he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality

of hate or the volatility of love.

Source: Station Zed (Graywolf Press, 2015)