This is a very new poem, and it's still in progress,
I think.
I mean, I don't think of this as a finished version.
But I'd like to read it tonight, because reading
it will help me to work on it.
It's called "GL, Unseen for Twenty Years."
And it's to a man I knew 20 years or more ago.
We were students together.
"Out of the blue, your tight strong smile.
Often in the first snow that even in Manhattan
smells like no other.
Even on my Broadway, crawling with cripples and the self
despised.
Suddenly, we're shoulder to shoulder in the left bank
streets--
Paris, the early '50s of invincible ignorance.
We are face to face in the Bozar Restaurant,
leaning our elbows on bridges, and in the musty room
with one bare bulb I lived in, six flights up,
with the view you drew from memory in ink.
I clasp your hips on the bike, sharing the empty plane
in March.
Teeth gritted in the wind, searching for Chartes.
I doze across from you in the boat train, we who are friends
and didn't understand, thinking that men and women had
to be lovers.
Your face, taut as a mask of wires,
half turned away, the one night walking the city of love where
money talked, so cold we warmed ourselves
with wine at every all-night cafe,
to keep on walking, talking.
Your words drift back in pieces.
I can't make love to women, you should know that.
But I'd like to hold you, just to know what
it's like to sleep together.
The one night out of all those weeks of talk,
you could talk of your fear.
I wonder what words of mine drift back to you.
Something like, but you're a man to me.
The swiftness of your mind is masculine.
Some set piece I'd embroidered from my woman's schooling,
like a motto in tapestry.
Of course you're a man.
I like you, what else could you be?
[LAUGHTER]
What else?
What bloody else?
Given the tragedy of our planetary life,
maybe you hate these memories.
But we were talking, in 1952, of the fear
of being crippled in that world of perfect men and women.
We were the givens and the stake, and we did badly.
And dear heart, I know if your lovers gave the word,
you'd have left me for a man, as I left you,
as we left each other--
seeking the love of men."