And this next group, from the same sequence,
goes back and forth as the sequence goes from one place
to another.
In fact, from France to the United States.
One time to another, as well.
"Wednesday night at the Comedie Francaise,
a hundred white and slender well-behaved adolescents
from one of the good liesses, file
into balcony rows saved for them to see Jeunesse les Bonnes.
Where over in the actresses, one of whose roles I took on
in San Francisco, our salon production, two men and one
woman in black shirts and tight black jeans.
I was madame for my friend's lyric vengeance
five Friday nights.
Jerry, our Solange, delivered her last monologue,
hands crossed, bald under the rigged spotlight,
like a condemned man awaiting the executioner.
James's gentle philological daftness
led him to invent a language and its people,
both called Prashad, cognate with Slavic truth,
simple and supple enough for nomic folktales.
He had written their history, which
filled 400 typed pages and three short plays, which
we three, fresh from Jene's ceremonies,
undertook to memorize and then to perform.
I was a fag hag in my early 20s, shared with my friends
their thrift shop, retro charm and the facility
of a linguist for recitations in dramatic form in a language
that didn't quite exist.
But James died, youngish, 20 years ago.
And Bill, who played Claire, my friend then,
doesn't speak or write to me, still
from San Francisco, because I wrote a book he didn't like.
We shared a vast, bay windowed flat with Paul, Chip,
sometimes.
Ben lives now, alone, in a room at the Y,
from which he goes to work every day
and returns a wall away from homelessness.
In our rundown wooden Victorian South
of Market, East of Van Ness, a trestle table
in the kitchen seated 10 for feasts
provisioned at a cut rate market called the Dented Can.
No, it was Bill and I who named it that.
And Bill and I imagined lives in France,
where he had sojourned as an army brat
while I had nearly a romance language degree.
Often, we sat among Paul's convalescent kitchen plants,
gossiping avidly with flawed accents over coffee mugs
and pan dulce from the Mexican grocery next door.
Tunisian Jews have a new snack bar downstairs,
featuring bagels and American soft drinks, favored,
it appears, by Sunday shoppers in the neighborhood where
I've lived these past 12 years.
Decades eclipsed, accent, somewhat improved."