Tonight, walking the aids memorial,
I am thinking about the man who hydrated
his lover by passing ice chips to him
with his mouth. Someone stumbles down the path,
maybe drunk, maybe a little fucked up,
and I know enough not to make eye contact,
not to stop. But I do stop—This man, slightly
younger than me, wants to fuck right here
on top of the red earth. Back East,
where I grew up, the past persists
like a forest: a man hits on another man
in a rural bar, and so is beaten
with a cast iron pan, and laid across
the tracks, and severed in half by a train.
Here, this stranger’s mouth still sweet
from the clove he’d been smoking,
we kiss like those men of our fathers’ era
who’d rendezvous in parks past dark. Never
again will I destroy the earth by flood,
God told Noah after the sun broke through,
the covenant signed in rainbow.
There was a time when I believed in God:
So convinced was I that the Earth was his
own beating heart, I talked to him out loud
in the forest at night. I felt endless then,
and knowing I wasn’t only enlarged me.