Fermata: after cleaning out my mother's place.
This moon, these fifty years.
On finding, in a book of poems by Norman Dubie, a 25-year-old letter from the bookbinder to my cousin, now dead of AIDS.
For the man who spun plates.
For Freedy, and for the Ohio dragging itself for its dead.
What becomes as tar each night, and rises.
Each moment is speaking to you of the other.
Outside the Coolawhatchie Blimpie Gas 'n' Go.
For the waitresses at the bars outside Fenway Park.
Upon being called mature and together, on respectfully rejecting both descriptors, and on suddenly remembering the best night of my life.
In a dream it all has to be true like the moon.
Upon being awakened at 3 A.M. by lovers talking, laughing, riding a motorbike beside the Arno River, Florence, November 25, 2002.
For the young man who would not let me in to vist Keat's grave with ten minutes left until closing time at the Cimittero Accatolica, Rome, December 1, 2002.
