by Mark Bibbins
what is the name of the song that goes
Now I am your widow
who never was your bride
///
One afternoon you fixed me
lunch in your tiny apartment
cream of mushroom soup
from a can
and English muffins
As you set our bowls
on a blanket
on the floor because you didn’t
own a table
you put on
a bad British accent and said
We’re having crumpets
It was raining but there was
an abundance of light
coming somehow from a source
outside we couldn’t see
From here that light feels like
what music sounds like
just before the record skips
///
What is it they say about water
something about it seeking itself
and how did jokes like this one move
so quickly through the world in 1983
What’s the hardest thing about having AIDS
Convincing your parents you’re Haitian
Did they spew out of fax machines
were they blurted over happy-hour beers
by somebody’s uncle
who worked for the state or by another’s
brother who worked in a garage
their jokes attaching themselves like leeches
to the swollen host of suffering
ugly but not useless
in order that we might endure
whatever side of suffering we’re on
What does GAY stand for
Got AIDS Yet
How many other acronyms crossed the membrane
that separated my rural high school
from the rest of the world and entered
the gym one afternoon
and filled it like a syringe Which boys
among us had just been watching
our friends in the showers
imagining their bodies
sliding against our own
like water seeking our own water
Which boys then saw the word AIDS
on the blood-filled test tube
on the cover of Newsweek
while other boys hooted and passed
the magazine around the locker room
Its own level that’s what water seeks
and which of these boys
was it only me which of us
among any of these boys thought
now I know now I know how
I’m going to die
///
When finally everyone was granted their childhood
wish for invisibility it turned out to be less
erotically useful than we had expected
The first legitimately wild desire I had
I turned into a pony so I could tame it
He clomped for years among the precincts
of my visible youth refusing
to be ridden My use
of the word first
also proves to have been based
on an unfounded sense of possibility
that defines my fading generation still
We cannot measure
adequately the corruption of our age
but we can make the wet of it wetter
by diving into a lake
the heat of it hotter
by leaping onto a pyre
On hearing the kvetching of coyotes
in a graphite night
my doppelgänger climbs
into a constellation two feet off the ground
When light
and death both want us
one of them might not
get its way
Other kid wishes were
x-ray eyes
the gift of flight
unending life
I’ve given names to a dozen more
wishes but deleted those names
because who could they ever have saved
Not the impossibly sweet and recalcitrant pony
who tried to steer me away from death
however my death was trying to happen
whether by fucking or hiding
whether by drowning or by stars
///
Before we met you had moved to Manhattan
but then you moved back
to the crappy capital that birthed us
How many of us did this
floating up and down
the Hudson like little Moseses
who couldn’t make up our minds
I want to say you wanted
to be near your nephew
but maybe that wasn’t it
In New York you met Val Kilmer before
he was famous maybe you worked
in a restaurant together anyway he gave you
a pair of his shoes
I still have them
and when I wear them
nothing magical happens but maybe
sometimes it does
William Basinski made the truest piece of art
in response to 9/11
before it happened
and mostly by accident He had been
digitizing old tape loops
and as they played
the magnetized coating
on the surface of the tapes began
to flake off
to disintegrate He kept recording
until there was no sound left
and replayed the digital files on his Brooklyn roof
as the sun went down behind
the appalling cloud of smoke
It’s a good story the one about
Val Kilmer giving you his shoes
I tell it when I wear them sometimes
Oh these shoes
were Val Kilmer’s He gave them
to my dead boyfriend
when they worked in a restaurant before
one was famous and the other was dead
Maybe not the best
story for a party and I don’t often
dance where I might be caught dancing
although the shoes
look like they would be amazing
in that kind of motion
Did I say the shoes are white
and that the beige lining
inside the soles has gotten so brittle and cracked
that each time I take them
from the closet and turn them over
a few more flakes fall out
///
Imagine a bird who lays her egg
then picks it up and flies without
landing until it hatches
Imagine a thousand
of these birds chopping away
at the soggy light
Since you died a thousand birds
have daily flown through me
each leaving behind an egg
some of which rotted
some of which hatched
releasing more birds that pecked
at my skull
but not generating the noise
and pain one might expect
It’s more like hearing
someone typing
an endless suicide note
in a room at the end
of a carpeted hall
Always one egg remains in me intact
and each time I yank it out
each time I crack it and crush it and throw
away the shell
it reappears whole
I pull it out and pull it out
I break it a thousand times
but nothing is ever inside
I carry it and carry it I do not land
///
I have been terrified
of clouds
since learning how much they weigh
A dam collapses
but ther
e’s no flood
the water already gone
presumably into a cloud
C.D. Wright said that elegy is a site
of not loss but opposition
nevertheless if anyone asks me
about death I try
to be optimistic I say yes
there is death
For me elegy
is a Ouija planchette
something I pretend not to touch
as I push it around trying
to make it say
what I want it to say
///
Seventeen years after you died
I sat with a friend on a Fire Island beach
after midnight drinking
red wine out of red plastic cups
Upon noticing in the distance headlights
bobbing in the fog I popped up and said no way
I’m forty same age as O’Hara let’s go let’s not
be this emergency again
It was a joke but it wasn’t a joke
I knew what it felt like
to be of a generation fully
accustomed to being struck down
///
You and our friends hid from me
how sick you were
so that I might come back to you
On its face
this strategy worked
though it didn’t have to
You came to Manhattan
to visit me once while you could
still manage the trip
At the apartment of a friend
who was a designer
she took pictures of us
holding sunflowers and wearing her robes
I loved playing for you
her answering machine greeting
which was just her purring her name
followed by a pause and
Do leave word
It possessed an elegance and brevity
we aspired to though we knew
by then that your life was turning
into a sort of treatise on brevity
On the way back to my apartment
we saw a painting discarded
on the street and you said
the canvas was big enough
to wrap a body in at least
that’s what one
of us might have said
///
Here in the spectral academy
here in the home of the freaks
I devote myself to something
Candy Darling said
I will not cease to be myself for foolish people
Yes but Candy what
if foolish people’s who I am
As the windows in the city sweat
Candy’s ghost collects
herself behind one of them
I know it
running her lines
her voice a raft
of white flowers floating
in a bathroom sink
Each day the internet invites us to try
suicide by zoo animals
or by eating a handful of ghost peppers
thus triggering a laugh track
over footage of a rainforest being razed
Ruin feasts on us
pausing between bites to baste
us with our juices
As a stopgap against never praising
ruin enough we might praise the alien
We might
praise blood
We might praise the blood of the alien
as it sizzles through the floor
while we’re sat safe in our seats
in the theater of money
We must believe as the child
in its nightlit room believes
it cannot be seen
that nothing could touch us there
///
after Doris Salcedo
Inverted wooden tables out of which
sprout the tenderest grasses
A blouse made of thousands
of needles
A chair another chair
a dozen chairs
a chest of drawers
all cemented in cement
Who will reach across
a distance so great
that light cannot cross it
to find a form for pain
Shoes of disappeared women
hovering in holes in walls
and sutured into boxes
of translucent animal skin
Enough rose petals stitched
together into a shroud
that it could cover
a hill where roses once grew
///
Not often but sometimes I look
at your photo album
a black faux snakeskin affair
Here you are
at football camp twelve
years old sitting next to Joe Namath
Here you’re in school
standing in front of a bulletin board
to which are stuck letters that crookedly spell
WHAT IS DECEMBER
Underneath that is what appears
to be a poem I’m glad
I can’t read
Your mouth is fully open belting
out something
a cheer a poem a song
Did you like to sing of course you did
like the time you sang
once from the hospital bed
Rich relations give crusts of bread and such
You can help yourself but don’t take too much
There’s one with you
and your siblings and a collie
who could be missing
one of its ears
You were born in an April
and you died in a September
It’s a fair question but now I couldn’t
say with much confidence
that I know what December is
only that you lived
through twenty-four of them
and then no more
As kids we were warned
against playing with gender
as if it were a plastic bag
THIS IS NOT A TOY
but here are some pictures
of you in drag
getting ready to head out to a party
or maybe that was the party
I think you were being Shelley Winters
You told me how you’d met her
and even went to her apartment once
When she flung open the door
she had scotch tape on her face
and her makeup half on
She was going to let you watch
her finish the job
and as she led you inside
she bellowed Come on
you’re in for a treat
///
Primula veris Syringa vulgaris
Forsythia suspensa Daucus carota
Asclepias syriaca Centaurea cyanus
and Toxicodendron radicans
were among the things
that grew wild where I grew up
most more lovely in the woods and fields
than their Latin names
except for the last poison ivy
some of which nearly every summer
I would accidentally touch
thereby prompting the publication
of the story of my foolishness
on the skin between my fingers
When one boy came to school
with his hands swollen so badly with it
that he could barely hold a pen
I was seized by a need to make
visible on my body
a difference about myself
I couldn’t yet articulate
so I rode to the top
of a hill where I knew poison ivy
grew and left my bike
on the side of the road
while I rubbed the leaves as hard
as I could on
the backs of my hands
Two weeks later they were still
weeping pus as I plunged them
into bowls of ice water Even after
the rash abated they looked
mottled and dead for months
cowslip lilac
forsythia Queen Anne’s lace
milkweed cornflower
Another year on the day
of class photos
I scratched at my face
with a sharpened popsicle stick
no blood just a few pink lines
that didn’t read
What else
I wanted a cast on my leg or anywhere
I wanted braces and glasses
and my tonsils out
I wanted scars
I don’t know when
or whether I figured out the difference
between wanting to be damaged
and wanting to be healed
///
The night David Wojnarowicz died
a spontaneous parade
clattered down Second Avenue
past the restaurant where I was working
my way through college
My syllabi were stuffed with books
about the plague
Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors
Monette’s Borrowed Time
though all I had
to do to see it was to step
out into the street
In one class we were quizzed
on the five stages of grief
In another I was invited
by the instructor to stand before
a lecture hall full of nursing students
to field their questions
about the consistency of semen
more slippery than sticky at least at first
Though not what most would call
an expert witness
I knew a thing or two
For weeks I sat at a table in a corridor at school
offering students condoms
in exchange for filling out surveys
about their sex lives
I interned
with social workers in the AIDS unit
of a hospital uptown
where one afternoon a patient
lurched at me for a kiss
while dragging behind him his IV stand
which held aloft what looked
like a bag of milk
Another afternoon
the head nurse gathered us
in one of the patients’ rooms
to wait with him in the dark for his death
Was it that the room had no windows
or that the shades had been drawn
or is it my memory overlaying
that scene with a different darkness now
Either way how would his soul
little ounce the soul I barely
believed in then escape
I don’t know what any
of this prepared me for I don’t