Someday I'll Love Roger Reeves

After Frank O'Hara 

Until then, let us have our gods and short prayers. Our obligations.

Our thighbone connected to our knee bone.

Our dissections and our swans. Our legs gashed

upon a barbwire fence and our heels tucked behind a lover’s knees.

Let us have a stalk of sugarcane to suck

and another to tear our backs with what it knows of disaster

and a tadpole’s folly. Let us have mistakes

and fish willing to come to a bell rung across a body of water.

Let us have our drawbridges and our moats. Our heavens

no higher than a pile of dried leaves. Let us have irrelevance

and a scalpel. A dislocated ankle and three more miles to run.

A plastic bottle to hold nothing but last names and a chill.

If none of this will be remembered, then let us keep speaking

with tongues light as screen doors clapping shut

on a child’s fingers. For this is love. To press

one frame against another

and when something like a finger is found between this pressing,

to press nevertheless. For this is our obligation.

Let us forget our obligations. For this is love.

Let us forget our love. Our eyelids’ need for beginnings

and ends and blood. Our coils of hunger

that turn another into dried honey on our hands.

And what if this goes on forever—our ours?

Our drafts and fragments? Our blizzards and our cancers?

Then let us. Then, let us hold each other toward heaven

and forget that we were once made of flesh,

that this is the fall our gods refuse to clean with fire or water.