Days of 1984
We would light a cigarette to make the El
round the track’s curve –
you could have one or the other, smoke or ride,
(dioscuri of the habitual),
and the first invites the second, tease/taunt
the lesser gods
of small desires, regent and viceroy of ritual.
We would drink
Louis Gluntz’ Rouge, Blanc, and Egri Bakaver –
apartments with eroded pissing-boy fountains,
dissolute Cupids true
to myth – debauched, perverse – where we kissed
the wrong people,
deceived one another and apologized ferociously,
word trumping deed,
faith over acts though we’d exiled all creeds to
Fort Lauderdale on spring break.
We would kick streetlamps to make them go
on, off, and steal
the white-food casseroles of roommates from upstate
New York who rehearsed
being broke while waiting for their big break, slender
as reeds despite
the economy of starch: I bend and break not,
wrote La Fontaine.
We would down grain-alcohol punch lovingly
ladled by charming
Sigma Phi Chi Alpha Psi Omegas, cheat
at 8-ball in rec rooms,
revere the bad advice of bands with dead
members, opine, recline,
learn the etiquette of embarrassment, leave
very late, late
indeed, walking home while one person steered
a bike serpentine
in overcranking Noh slow-motion, sober angel,
furtive and fervent, staving
off the three sisters, furies of suburban darkness
who’d punish our petty
misdeeds (misdemeanor carelessness and cruelty)
while we woozily tilted
at windmills with stuttered rhetoric from the survey
course of our charismatic
Marxist professor refused tenure: class, everything
is class. We would sleep
in our narrow beds and in our friends’ narrow beds
and on the couch, any
couch and in any loft, and any food after 2 a.m.
was nectar in neon served
with nightshift tolerance, dawn flaring
in our saucers.
We would watch grim or flippant
French or German films
on dates not dates, all nuance and subtitle,
auteur and sturmendrang,
and only one or two of us didn’t look like hell
all the time so we were
well-suited, reveling in the oeuvre of misery.
We would say: here’s
where you’ll be in 10 years, 20 years and it was
far away and far from
each other – the future as we understood it
was something, someone
else, event versus increment recruiting us
for purpose unknown
though we could not imagine the new
bodies, faces, names
that would replace us: could they replace us?
We would trust
each other, lie, lose each other, we would watch
each other change
but you look the same to me now as then –
keep in mind
how bad my eyes are, astigmatic, my prodigious
myopia simpatico to lines
sketched in forehead and jowl by life lived
with insouciance, minor
neglect and torrid behavior inviting more of the same
and we said, the door’s
always open, which it was because fear
didn’t have anything
we wanted. We wanted. We would light a cigarette
and sit on the back porch
of fourth-floor walk-ups and the smoke scrawled
our fates in serif curls,
enlisting sky as tablet, stars as punctuation
and when direction knocked
we turned up the volume, and when obligation
(“whose name we do not care
to recall”) called, we studiously ignored it
and when we were smart,
we were very smart, indeed – toeing the line
between earnest and florid –
and when we were not, we were, wrote Longfellow,
rhyme-laden bastard
serenading his lovely daughter, horrid.