The Dead Remember Brooklyn

It is the great arguments

we are proud of, over a nibbled peach,

hair in the comb, a faulty lube job;

the reconciliations were always naked

in borrowed rooms, sometimes in Queens

or Staten Island, we touched each other

shyly—we reminded each other

of loneliness and funk and beautiful pigeons

with oil-slick necks, cooing bitterly—

but there we lost each other

in forgiveness; keeping score,

being wounded even in triumph,

walking home down leafy avenues

etched with the faint double line

of extinct trolleys, caressing

carved hearts under a sheen of sap

with a ragged nail, sleeping alone,

choosing the dream of betrayal,

entering by the wide door

and waking dead—there

we were superb. In Brooklyn

we held our own.