Forsaken Elegies

Your gift was you could name any random

recording (and its personnel) on any random radio station

or record player.

You and I taxied downtown. Awkward silences

born of different fathers that rainy May evening: to celebrate

your twenty-sixth birthday and my fifteenth at the Howard Theatre.

Cannonball Adderley! Oscar Brown  Jr.!

Best of all, sweet Nancy Wilson!

After the show you drag me backstage to seek her autograph.

As sweet Nancy smiles and inscribes my crumpled napkin,

she boldly checks you out standing next to me,

fondling the neck of your umbrella.

Twenty or so years later on Cape Cod

I again spot Tisha dancing her feet off

still pretty as in high school modishly on-the-butch-side

making magical turns with a shorter muscular black

woman equally modish on-the-butch-side.

As a seventies anthem trails off  I watch them walk out onto

the shabby pier and the rest of the night through

surveil Tisha dancing and smiling into the eyes of and

tonguing her friend

                              so very deeply.

away from me

on down that street

                switching

to some other doo-wop

in your arms

of imagi-

                nation

and you blow-

                ing some old

song: yeah yeah

                yeah-eh-eh-eh

oh, the surprise

and the same old

same ole

how can

                this be

                you’d ev-

                er leave

                me in

                some “old

                              leafy glade”

                to the intrusion of violins

and my old breaking heart

                needs to belong

at last

(oh i just want to die)