An anorexic mannequin,
featureless
save an unwavering stage-right
stare,
always alone, I watched
you perform.
But during that winter
squall
of Nineteen-Seventy-Four,
when snow
coffin-deep, hid
everything essential,
where to trust the road
was safe
was to think away pot
holes, downed
power lines and where fog
dimmed
all our feints and
fears, that night
your cousin Tito and I,
twin impulses
of fealty and fidelity,
we sat two feet apart
at the same Filipino community
center table. We both
loved you.
I know now what I did
not know then;
that love manifests
analogous to snow:
Slush flurry—egg white
slurry beaten stiff,
glacier—crystals—water
vapor,
volatile, tenuous as
jealousy.
Fat, wet flake clung to
weeds
until everything we thought
we knew
was buried, indiscernible,
and reimagined.
Tito smoked his last
Camel
while you mimicked Tony
Orlando.
Would
you want him first-time driving in ice,
at night, in your car, in a city none of us
knew?
He threw on the
cashmere overcoat
picked up in San Diego
where he’d never need it,
(that peacock gesture
for you, cousin).
Your El Camino keys in
hand we hit the ice,
skidding our way to a collision.
Love doesn’t even melt
the same way twice,
temperatures and
altitudes as variable as emotions.
A momentary flare up, a
match snuffed or forgotten,
that was me, but goddam
Mike,
even at sixteen you
could sharpen floes into stilettos
After the show, after
your unbearable
razor-edged silence
radiating out,
like a years’ worth of
my parent’s scorn,
an evolving front,
polar and tropical air colliding,
all of it common and
natural and familiar,
after we loaded the El
Camino
with guitars, amps, and
speakers,
the engine idled up
from zero,
after we all got in, you
backed it up
then rammed the
center’s brick wall.
Tito and I both turned
sideways to look at you
as
though we were one,
to
snap the lies off our faces,
Whore.
Fucking puta!
You wanted me to feel
your hold.
What I felt was a calving,
an iceberg
ripping free of the
glacier, a visible tip
hinting at our encroaching
future.
