You're the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With

   for Jess

Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you

this, like this,

in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love

living. Even actors don’t

exactly love the spotlight they move through,

as your sister, the actor,

has told us; they just need to be lit

for narrative motion

to have meaning. As such it is,

with artifice, and embarrassment,

that I move through fear

to you, tonight, where I had dreams,

a short nap ago, about lines

of poetry I struck through

with everyday blues, month after

month, in the dream,

after dream; an attempt

I guess to forget, if I could: defeat

sometimes is defeat

without purpose. The news at least tells me that

much. I know now,

in fact, we don’t have to be brave,

not to survive a night

like any we’ve looked on

together, seeing blue-tinted snow

once in a K-mart

parking lot’s giant, two-headed lamp—

and my father hooked up,

up the street, with no chance

of waking—as many years ago now

as how much longer I’ve lived

with you than without. 

Forgive me, again, that I write you an elegy

where a love poem should be.