August 03, 2016

Squall of 1976



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.

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