Forsaken Elegies
i. brother
Your gift was you could name any random
recording (and its personnel) on any random radio station
or record player.
You and I taxied downtown. Awkward silences
born of different fathers that rainy May evening: to celebrate
a your twenty-sixth birthday and my fifteenth at the Howard Theatre.
Cannonball Adderley! Oscar Brown Jr.!
Best of all, sweet Nancy Wilson!
After the show you drag me backstage to seek her autograph.
As sweet Nancy smiles and inscribes my crumpled napkin,
she boldly checks you out standing next to me,
fondling the neck of your umbrella.
ii. longing
Twenty or so years later on Cape Cod
I again spot Tisha dancing her feet off
still pretty as in high school modishly on-the-butch-side
making magical turns with a shorter muscular black
woman equally modish on-the-butch-side.
As a seventies anthem trails off I watch them walk out onto
the shabby pier and the rest of the night through
surveil Tisha dancing and smiling into the eyes of and
tonguing her friend
so very deeply.
iii. out that door
away from me
on down that street
switching
to some other doo-wop
in your arms
of imagi-
nation
and you blow-
ing some old
song: yeah yeah
yeah-eh-eh-eh
oh, the surprise
and the same old
same ole
how can
this be
you’d ev-
er leave
me in
some “old
leafy glade”
to the intrusion of violins
and my old breaking heart
needs to belong
at last
(oh i just want to die)