1.
This is for the girl I wanted to fuck in 1992
the quiet brunette in my freshman dorm
with the sad eyes and the bright smile that
broke across your face slowly—like dawn
in Syracuse in November—with the news
Magic lost his luster, heard the night the first
snow flew in front of the Hall of Languages,
and I realized this was going to be hard. For
the world teaches lessons in unexplained ways
when you are 19, the fact you do not control
much of anything, especially when winter came
early to freeze your long, wet hair, and it did not
help to weigh it down with gel. And the football
team would not win every game, but you mastered
a few tricks: like how to mix a great Screwdriver
because stadium security let you take orange
juice from the dining hall into Saturday morning
games, or which states had not gotten around
to placing holograms on licenses, so you could
peel back the laminate and change your date
of birth, scratching August into June with a utility
knife. But cutting ties to home was more difficult.
Would the underclassman I left behind remember
me? And why did I want her just three nights a week?
Because damn that mystery living on the other wing
was gorgeous—past the bathroom, second door on the
left—where I only dared venture on those weekends
when I pegged my jeans and layered my shirts, hooked
a cap through a belt loop and went out on the town with
my friends who shared my new-found taste for shitty beer.

 

2.
she listened to Paula Cole and R.E.M., stole glances
at the T.V. in the disgusting lounge where my crew
piled on top of one another for the latest episode
of “Saturday Night Live,” watching Chris Farley fall
through fiberboard furniture as if the weight of hilarity
was just too much, the other side of an oddly angled
blade passed to him by Belushi, baton of Lenny Bruce
and Robin Williams’ noose, the ironic way one’s arms
grow too numb to access your wishes when you live
trapped in the bowels of the lamp. Yet I hedged my bet
on corny jokes, even though it was you killing me with
your fuzzy bunny slippers, plaid pajama pants, T-shirt
creeping up from your waist to reveal a precious trace
of alabaster tummy when you reached for the microwave
over the sink that stank of vomit, Ramen and Labatt’s.
You shook your head and asked if I enjoyed the company
of fools who burned the wick of time as if it were endless,
rough beasts slouched over joysticks in a perpetual quest
to level up without a glimpse of the end game. And it was
when you flashed this obstinate streak that I fell in love,
learned I could jump through a thousand hoops and stay
another’s pet, hang degrees on the walls of halls until all
faith was lost in paint, and the margins would still close
in to chase the words off my back pages, make me a stock
character in the Loman family saga dead at their desk.
So I asked if you wanted to take a drive in a car borrowed
from a friend. I wanted you to see I refused to let life run
me over while I was sitting still, but you said I should not
be driving. You grabbed the keys and asked, “Would your
friend mind?” I said, “He’s too sad to care about a thing.”

3.
This is for the kiss I missed, the flash of regret when
you passed through the door, my fear trailing behind,
something caught in the awkward gravity of youth’s
bindings that imprison and liberate you simultaneously
even though the one thing you have to orient yourself

is a room of mirrors, cracked by the confounding weight
of revelation. I held it beside the familiar burden of the
disappointed look on my father’s face, his voice saying,
“Why are you screwing this up by thinking?” Memories
of feeble excuses fold around details concerning distance
and convenience, echo through the marbled mausoleum
where I store my youthful indiscretions beside images
of her taxi circling the drive in front of Sadler Hall chased
by my prayers it would loop around as the paths of teens
often do. And if the wheels spun in the aftermath of May’s
first mildewed rain, I would surely carry around more faith
in God today, strapped to my back with all my other crosses,
heartaches, missteps, these fact-I-am-still-growing pains
punctuated by these intrusive messages from the ghosts
who lack the courtesy to declare where they are calling from.
Perhaps they would not play the leading role in the stories
I tell when I talk about love—the exhausting permutations
that pull Hamlet and Prufrock into the same vacillating bed.
Maybe I could do better at leaning into the present and see
our paths, often practical, do not always lead to waterfalls.
Then I could host a funeral for all these things long gone—
the darts missed while looking over my slumped shoulders
their wounds miraculously healed when I fell in your arms—
just beware the barbs that remind us I am neither a saint nor
a sinner but a nautilus spinning around the locus of grace.

4.
So, this is really for the woman who makes me dizzy
one decade down the road, who realized I am 1992
cobbled together with 1984, my Big Brother trouble
and the narrative irrefutably fucked by Marty McFly
because every time we rail against the past with anvil
fists we simply beat it into a new shape, still leaving
us with the funny aftertaste that comes with drinking
from a tin cup. This is for the wife who reassures me
when I forget things—insists this mind is still sharp
enough to exact mortal wounds—and warns me that

overthinking things is the cause of death for several
cemeteries’ worth of idealists sacrificed on altars
of their own design. She lingers over caramel lattes
on Saturday mornings spent dancing to the B-side
catalog of Men at Work. Because are we all not
simply waiting for our real lives to begin? To see
sunsets on the water break into bands of diamonds
suitable for hanging from the ears of Cassiopeia
holding court over border states with obsidian skies.
Her lessons reaffirm the potency of telling stories
in the present tense, the immediacy discovered when
lost deep in eyes that contain multitudes. I watch her
face intently, trace the laugh lines making plot points
like a heart monitor and read nothing between them
but goodness. She is the reason I keep turning pages
searching the universe for subtext and inspiration
insisting the secret to artful living lies in ambition.
A queen, she matches my hand with hers, and we
settle fireside to watch heavenly bodies blaze these
trails for our dreams back to an imperfect future.