when the confessing one isn't the only one dying

When the Confessing One Isn't 
the Only One Dying

Looking at your face

now you have become ready to die

is like kneeling at an old gravestone

on an afternoon without the sun, trying to read

the white chiseling of the poem

in the white stone.

                                    Galway Kinnell

That last day in the woods you said I didn’t know it 
when it was useful

when it was more and all that you said

it was, purpose and urge or the other

way around.  It.  Now a limp lip, no more

dangerous than the birth of a worm, the birth

of mud in the bowl of earth you’d dug

beside the river you never drowned in but wanted

to and said you should've.  But by the time

we met you’d taken to dry banks

so far from water you could only imagine

it move.  You were tidal, which was better,

because taking and giving had a reason.  And while

I admire the candor age seems to slip

into our pocket seasons before we discover

the clean tissue of it, I think I would have wanted

to know you when sex meant something

more than smashed glass and abandoned factories.

When it meant you were there and I was there

or he or she was there, and what you discovered

was cleaner than a first needle, cleaner than

the priest who caught you who whipped you

for the other boy and the stolen dope and went

inside you and then drew water for a bath after-

wards.  I would have wanted to know you before

that but by the time we met it was lips,

it was all either of us could afford.  But Jesus

the years had plowed you under, and our last breath

together was a confession

of speed and a 357 Magnum and a buddy

and an abduction and you remember taking her

over and over again and the pcp and the blood

of  the shredded girl are a fragrance now, a flavor

on the back of your tongue.  You couldn’t remember

her name that day although she used to be a friend

in high school thinking you just wanted

to take her for a ride.  You said you’d like to know

if she was ok after those two days and now every time

I read about Serbia or Rwanda or the Vagina

Monologues I think about her.  
At some point you said her name

was Sharon.  Then it was Father.  You said you

were eight and nine and ten you said 
you were 17, you said no

you said no as you bent me

over  that first time and pushed every no you ever knew

into me with everything but you.  A cleaver.

A wanna-be surgeon’s touch. A Lazarus step

at the end of the second road, already dead once

but called forth.  Called forth.