► Poems On Hiv, selections with comments

[vikdoc]

I've long been posting poems on the GB list - not my own, but from my reading, along with comments. The aim is to try to take away some of the barriers many of us have to reading poetry, and to show them for what they are: concentrated bits of emotion and reflection that helps us understand the world and ourselves.

This long and powerful poem by Michael Lassel is a very good example of that:


How To Watch Your Brother Die
For Carl Morse

When the call comes, be calm.
Say to your wife, "My brother is dying. I have to fly
to California."
try not to be shocked that he already looks like
a cadaver.
Say to the young man sitting by your brother's side,
"I'm his brother."
Try not to be shocked when the young man says,
"I'm his lover. Thanks for coming."

Listen to the doctor with a steel face on.
Sign the necessary forms.
Tell the doctor you will take care of everything.
Wonder why doctors are so remote.

Watch the lover's eyes as they stare into
your brother's eyes as they stare into
space.
Wonder what they see there.
Remember the time he was jealous and
opened your eyebrow with a sharp stick.
Forgive him out loud
even if he can't
understand you.
Realize the scar will be
all that's left of him.

Over coffee in the hospital cafeteria
say to the lover, "You're an extremely good-looking
young man."
Hear him say,
"I never thought I was good enough looking to
deserve your brother."

Watch the tears well up in his eyes. Say,
"I'm sorry. I don't know what it means to be
the lover of another man."
Hear him say,
"Its just like a wife, only the commitment is
deeper because the odds against you are so much
greater."
Say nothing, but
take his hand like a brother's.

Drive to Mexico for unproven drugs that might
help him live longer.
Explain what they are to the border guard.
Fill with rage when he informs you,
"You can't bring those across."
Begin to grow loud.
Feel the lover's hand on your arm
restraining you. See in the guard's eye
how much a man can hate another man.
Say to the lover, "How can you stand it?"
Hear him say, "You get used to it."
Think of one of your children getting used to
another man's hatred.

Call your wife on the telephone. Tell her,
"He hasn't much time.
I'll be home soon." Before you hang up say,
"How could anyone's commitment be deeper than
a husband and a wife?" Hear her say,
"Please. I don't want to know all the details."

When he slips into an irrevocable coma,
hold his lover in your arms while he sobs,
no longer strong. Wonder how much longer
you will be able to be strong.
Feel how it feels to hold a man in your arms
whose arms are used to holding men.
Offer God anything to bring your brother back.
Know you have nothing God could possible want.
Curse God, but do not
abandon Him.

Stare at the face of the funeral director
when he tells you he will not
embalm the body for fear of
contamination. Let him see in your eyes
how much a man can hate another man.

Stand beside a casket covered in flowers,
white flowers. Say,
"thank you for coming," to each of seven hundred men
who file past in tears, some of them
holding hands. Know that your brother's life
was not what you imagined. Overhear two
mourners say, "I wonder who'll be next?" and
"I don't care anymore,
as long as it isn't you."

Arrange to take an early flight home.
His lover will drive you to the airport.
When your flight is announced say,
awkwardly, "If I can do anything, please
let me know." Do not flinch when he says,
"Forgive yourself for not wanting to know him
after he told you. He did."
Stop and let it soak in. Say,
"He forgave me, or he knew himself?"
"Both," the lover will say, not knowing what else
to do. Hold him like a brother while he
kisses you on the cheek. Think that
you haven't been kissed by a man since
your father died. Think,
"This is no moment to be strong."

Fly first class and drink Scotch. Stroke
your split eyebrow with a finger and
think of your brother alive. Smile
at the memory and think
how your children will feel in your arms
warm and friendly and without challenge.

Michael Lassell

This poem is long, yet still simple and direct and easy to read. Its an excellent example of what is, today, an overlooked ability of poetry - its ability to report a story in an condensed and memorable way.

For centuries in fact this was the main function of poetry. Bards, minstrels, storytellers developed the long narrative epics, like Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata and the Iliad. It was a mix of reporting combined with emotions. Narrative poetry was not neutral, but didactic in the best way, telling you what happened, but also how the narrator felt about it and how he felt you should feel.

The growth of other forms of recording experiences, from novels to television to the Net, combined with the shift towards more personal, directly emotional poetry has made this function of poetry seem redundant. (Though if one wants to be fanciful one could consider some kinds of Net communications like weblogs the latest form of didactic poetry !)

As this poem proves though this sort of poetry can still be very impactful. Its a moot point what sort of criteria one should use in judging its quality, but it seems to me that if its direct and makes its point that should be enough, like journalism in a way.

There can be no doubt that judged on those criteria this is an excellent poem. Some of it may verge on the mawkish. I did find myself occasionally wondering if someone is suddenly going to change be as supportive and emotional as the straight brother who narrates the poem, but that’s me being cynical, and deaths of loved ones can to do strange things to you.

And any implausibility is more than offset by the effectiveness of having poem seen from the perspective of the straight brother. There are no dearth of poems on AIDS (or homophobia), but mostly written by those suffering from it, or their partners, and there is a lack of emotional distance in these poems which, while obviously understandable, impedes their ability to connect with a larger audience.

But by making the narrator the straight brother, this poem gets that necessary distance. It makes him a stranger to these worlds of AIDS and homosexuality and the subject of the poem is really his journey to empathy with these worlds. He starts understanding of the humiliations they partake of, of the prejudices directed at them. This is all the more impactful for coming from even those close to him, like with his wife's squeamishness about hearing about the love between two men.

And even from himself. Because in allowing himself to wonder, to question himself, he is acknowledging the unconscious prejudices he has operated under. The point though is not that he was prejudiced, but that he was willing to expose himself to new knowledge and learn from it. I think a mistake often made from those suffering from the effects of the prejudice, is to condemn people out of hand just for having the prejudice, when surely what matters is whether people act on their prejudices or whether they learn about them and fight them.

That’s what the narrator of this poem does, and its what makes it such an effective poem to communicate to a larger world the problems of being HIV positive and being gay. It wouldn’t work if he was all loving and accepting from day one. Its because he’s not expecting the negative reactions from the border guards, his wife, the funeral director, its because he feels weird about holding another man, that adds all that more when it actually happens.

Its a journey to real acceptance, and we can only hope that those many prejudiced against us can find it in themselves to learn like the brother in this poem and to make the journey he does.

Vikram

PS: I particularly like these lines. They are the perfect answer to those standard comments about how gay relationships aren’t lasting:

Say,
"I'm sorry. I don't know what it means to be
the lover of another man."
Hear him say,
"Its just like a wife, only the commitment is
deeper because the odds against you are so much
greater."

PPS: I couldn’t find more poems by Michael Lassell, who’s an American gay poet. But here’s a link to a bio about him:

http://shergoodforest.com/biocentral/lassellm.html

[Rish]

Yes, Vikram, it truly is a touching poem!

Poetry is meant to say so much in a few turns of phrases, a spectrum of emotion in one exclamation mark... I have always loved poetry more than prose. This is another sibling's thoughts. The difference is that the narrator is a girl of 14.

She lives in fear
Always waiting for
her sister's scream.
A scream that comes
from so far deep inside
that it tears you limb from limb.
What would she do
when the scream came?
Hug her, kiss her, comfort her?
And then what?
What about the next day
what would happen then?
She needs a cure
for the scream.
Everyone
must work for the cure.

Rachael Peters
14 years old

[vikdoc]

In Memory Of David Kalstone
who died of AIDS

Lime-and mint mayonnaise and salsa verde
Accompanied poached fish that Helen made
For you and J.M. when you came to see us
Just at the salmon season. Now a shade

A faint blurred absence who before had been
Funny, intelligent, kindness itself,
You leave behind, beside the shock of death,
Three of the finest books upon my shelf.

“Men die from time to time,” said Rosalind,
“But not,” she said, “for love.” A lot she knew!
From the green world of Africa the plague
Wiped out the Forest of Arden, the whole crew

Of innocents, of which, poor generous ghost,
You were among the liveliest. Your friend
Scattered upon the calm Venetian tides
your sifted ashes so they may descend

Even to the bottom of the monstrous world
Or lap at marble steps and pass below
The little bridges, whirl and eddy through
A liquified Palazzo Barbaro.

That mirrored splendor briefly entertains
Your passing as the whole edifice trembles
Within the waters of the Grand Canal,
And writhes and twists, wrinkles and reassembles.

Anthony Hecht

An exquisite poem, first shown to me by my friend Jay. It has a construction as formal, beautiful and sad as the palazzos of the city in which it ends. David Kalstone was an American critic who seems to have been a much loved man. Apart from Hecht's poem, there are several other memorials to him, including one from the JM of the poem, the poet James Merrill.

Kalstone also received a memorial in Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony, a novel which is a lightly fictionalised account of White's life. It is set in the huge explosion of gay life that took place in the Seventies, and the terrible shadow that came in its wake. The latter part of the novel becomes a litany of friends dying from AIDS, quitting the stage one after the other, just as the musicians do in Haydn's piece of music after which the novel takes its name.

Of the many characters in the book, two of the most important are Joshua and Eddie, the fictional versions of Kalstone and Merrill. And the novel ends as this poem describes with Eddie/Merrill's funeral for Joshua/Kalstone, emptying his ashes into the waters of Venice as he recited a poem. Along with this I’m attaching an extract from the New York Times review of the book, and the ending of the book itself.

Of this poem, all I can say is that it is really simple, yet both exquisite and hypnotic in its simplicity. The grief is deeply felt, yet makes all the more impact for not being an outpouring, but delicately conveyed in a formal, classic fashion.

And the third verse in particular remains with you. Its a reference of course to Shakespeare's As You Like It with Rosalind, Shakespeare's most attractive heroine, and the Duke's brotherhood under the greenwood trees of the Forest of Arden. That brotherhood becomes the metaphor for all the brotherhood of the gay world as depicted by White and destroyed so utterly. Could there be a more memorable way of saying it than these light, yet profoundly bitter lines:

" “Men die from time to time,” said Rosalind,
“But not,” she said, “for love.” A lot she knew!
From the green world of Africa the plague
Wiped out the Forest of Arden, the whole crew

Of innocents... "


Vikram


from The New York Times:

...Two of White's most extended and interesting portraits are of a millionaire poet called Eddie and of the narrator's close friend Joshua, ''considered one of the leading experts alive on Sir Philip Sidney.'' Again, White makes no attempt to disguise James (Jimmie to his friends) Merrill or the distinguished scholar David Kalstone. White's version of Joshua, ''the great friend of my life,'' is generous and heartfelt; ''The Farewell Symphony'' is in large part an elegy for him. As White remarks toward the end of the book, ''I wanted to build a monument of words for Joshua, big and solid, something that would last a century.''

In White's view, Joshua had (as T. S. Eliot said of Henry James) ''a mind so fine that no idea could violate it'' -- in marked contrast to White's own intellectual promiscuity. ''Whereas I was convinced by almost any idea I could grasp and passed quickly from structuralism to semiotics by way of a Gramsci-inspired Marxist cultural analysis, Joshua smiled at my enthusiasms and yawned at my lectures. He wanted to know how to prepare pasta alla puttanesca.''

The portrait of Eddie, despite White's often stated admiration for Merrill's poetry, is far less flattering. Eddie comes across as bitchy and self-involved. When Joshua dares to say of a new poem of Eddie's, ''Isn't it . . . a bit . . . cold?'' Eddie ''slapped his forehead and said, 'Of course! I forgot to put the feeling in!' He rushed upstairs to the cupola that served him as a study and fiddled with the verses for an hour before he descended with lines that made us weep, so tender were they, so melting and exalted.'' The point of this anecdote is to show how ''heartless'' and ''manipulative'' artists can be, though isn't it possible that White -- if this exchange really occurred -- missed Merrill's irony? After Joshua's death from AIDS, Eddie calls to say he has been in touch with Joshua ''via the Ouija board,'' and that Joshua was ''very excited'' that he would soon be returning to earth as a baby girl in Calcutta. ''I laughed and hurried to get off the line,'' White's narrator remarks, ''so offended was I.'' In White's view, someone ''forgot to put the feeling'' in Eddie.

As the deaths mount in White's own life, however, he comes to understand better Eddie's Ouija-board-inspired ''dress-up party version of the afterlife'' -- an allusion to Merrill's epic ''The Changing Light at Sandover.'' As he finds himself groping for meaningful rituals of his own (''A death without rituals is intolerable''), he concedes that Eddie's poetic ventriloquism was ''a normal way of keeping the dead alive.'' Rituals of mourning mark the beginning and end of ''The Farewell Symphony.'' The novel opens with a visit to the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where the narrator leaves flowers at his French lover's grave, and ends with Eddie (who will later die of AIDS himself) swirling Joshua's ashes ''from a gondola into the Grand Canal.''

Christopher Benfey

From The Farewell Symphony:

...Nevertheless a death without rituals is intolerable. Most people would do well to stick to church ceremonies, which are noble and full throated in the right well tested places and even dull and distracting elsewhere in just the desired degree, but Eddie has a solemn, awed, fluent way of celebrating the great, hard moments. He swirled Joshua’s ashes from a gondola into the Grand Canal while reciting a poem he’d written for the occasion.

I went back to the palazzo where Joshua had lived. The principessa had asked me to stop by. She led me up to the attic, which looked like the reversed hull of a war shop, all ancient, rough hewn beams. There, in that maritime desolation, stood a little pile of Joshua’s things - dirty white trousers, sunscreen, the typewriter his computer had replaced, an old copy of the Beaux-Arts magazine, an extra fan. The principessa behaved as though it was, well, even legally necessary that I do something with these pathetic possessions, Joshua’s half-hearted pledge that he’d come back if not the next summer then the one after.

I shrugged, even laughed a bit rudely, took the things away (did she think they were infected with the “Ides” virus?), and dumped them in the trash just outside the door. Joshua’s spirit was no more in these things than was our virus; his spirit was lodged in Eddie’s pages, in his own, even, I hoped in mine.

Edmund Wilson

[vikdoc]

The Man with Night Sweats

I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.

My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.

I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,

A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.

I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.

I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead

Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

Thom Gunn

A poem about betrayal, and one which is all the more bitter because its not by other people, but our own bodies. The poet writes about how while he was growing up his body seemed utterly trustworthy, invincible. Whatever he did, his body supported him, even pushed him to further risks with the promise of its support.

Yet that promise was a lie and the body betrays you. What you thought would always heal, one day does not and you are left alone at night, covered in sweat and scared, piercingly aware of your mortality.

This betrayal by the body is part of any experience of growing old. Yet in this case, one cannot escape a link not to aging, but AIDS. Gunn is one of the few fairly mainstream poets directly to explore the subject of his homosexuality in his verse. AIDS inescapably runs through his later poems, and the symptom of the title, the night sweats, is one of the symptoms of AIDS (this is NOT to say that the narrator has it, but that he must be reminded - and wants to remind us - of it).

Even if one accepts that the betrayal of our bodies is a universal experience, it has a special resonance with AIDS. In nearly all the memoirs of the plague the bitterness of this betrayal is constant. Because gay liberation was to such a large extent a liberation of our bodies. We no longer has to be ashamed of our bodies and of their attraction to other bodies of the same kind.

Overwhelmingly the symbol for gay liberation has been the male body - the male body on display at parades, in bathhouses, in magazines, posters, stickers, films, gyms. The body was how we recognised each other, how we acknowledged who we were. One could see this as lewd and regrettable, one could see it as superficial, one could regret the way the body was fetishized, but the importance of the body could not be denied.

Which is why when AIDS came, it must have seemed all the worse at first for being a betrayal of the body. Our bodies were the source of our joy and, as the poet says, it was our bodies that encouraged us to take risks with them. Yet it was our bodies, the very thing that most gay people of the time used as the symbol of their affirmation, that was the cause of their downfall.

AIDS defiled the body, and everything the body has seemed to stand for. It destroyed the beauty of bodies and made corrupt the attraction of bodies to other bodies. All the freedom, the joy, the sex of gay liberation was turned upon itself in the most horrific of ways.

In time we have learned, and AIDS while still terrible, it no longer has the horrors for gay men that it did. It isn't just us, it isn't just our bodies that are at risk. The body remains a symbol for us, but not the only symbol and one whose superficialities we are aware of, however much it still may lure us.

Yet that first horror will always remains a part of the gay experience, when, as Gunn says, faced with the betrayal of our bodies, all we could do was curl up and hug ourselves, "As if hands were enough/ To hold an avalanche off."

Vikram

[vikdoc]

The Embrace

You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out -- at work maybe? --
having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you -- warm brown tea -- we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

Mark Doty

AIDS has inescapably been a major theme in gay writing, though not always, I think, well handled. There are some decent examples like Paul Monette's Halfway House and Edmund Wilson's The Farewell Symphony, but the best I think was written not by a gay man, but an outsider, Abraham Verghese' My Own Country.

Mark Doty has been praised as one of the best young American poets and has also written a memoir, Heaven's Coast, that deals with HIV from the point of view of someone whose partner is positive, but he is not. Doty's partner Wally died from the disease. I haven't read the book, but here's an extract online:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f...eavenscoast.htm

This poem is set after the lover's death, and deals with the curious solace to be found in dreams. We are often told not to believe in dreams, to face reality. Yet when there is no solace in reality can one be blamed for taking comfort in dreams? If the lover was alive here, his presence would be tinged with the pain of his illness, his imminent death. As a dream the poet can accept the comfort of his presence as the gift it is.

Vikram

PS: One of the most moving accounts of what HIV has meant for the gay community was written by Andrew Sullivan in 1996. This was in the wake of the first treatments that seriously offered the hope of keeping the disease in check, if not defeated. Sullivan, who is positive, wrote about the shock of finding the prospect of life, when everything had been dominated by death, and reflected on the changes wrought by those terrible years.

Today, the hope Sullivan hails seems sadly premature: the treatments work, but not always, and the side effects are terrible, and the cost keeps them out of the range of most of those with the disease. And all the while the numbers of those dying continues to rise inexorably. Yet the changes wrought by the disease are undeniable, and Sullivan's essay is still worth reading:

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/homosexualit...artnum=19961110

[vikdoc]

The Playground Bell

Dead drunk by nine – this used to be enough.
In Manchester I went out every night;
Picked up and stayed wherever there was drink
With men whose names were last thing on my mind –
Including one who slung the Union Jack
Over his bedside lamp for atmosphere
On the Last Night of the Proms in eighty-two;
My first ‘experience’: even the white socks
I’d been advised to wear were a success –
One foot displayed, half-casually, to mark
My absolute virginity. The final touch:
My mother fixed a blow-wave in my hair.

Always indulgent towards her only son
(Lucky for me my parents got divorced),
She must have sensed I wasn’t the same boy
Who’d walked for twenty miles or more a day
On gritstone tracks, over the backs of hills –
The Pennine waste of Bleaklow, Kinder Scout.

The landscape of the city was more harsh:
Bleaker than any tract of mountain peat,
The bus ride down the Manchester Old Road.
In Sackville Street, between the Thomson’s Arms
And the Rembrandt Hotel, a universe
Peopled by drunks and rent boys – one a punk,
Who used to leave his girlfriend at the bar
On business. After barely half an hour,
He’d stroll back in and stand them both a drink.

I quickly learned the language and the code –
Had ‘sisters’ who were kind men twice my age,
Who paid for beers and thought I was matured
Confided, gave advice and lent me fares.
On Saturday nights we’d drive to Liverpool
Or Stoke-on-Trent, as if there were a difference
Between one seedy night-spot and another –
Though local accents used to turn me on,
And that rare prize – a genuine foreigner
On holiday, was worth the taxi ride
To some remote hotel. Leaving in secret,
Before breakfast, pocketing an address
(In Paris!) I would never write to, a poignant act.

One Christmas I saved up and went to Heaven –
The biggest dive in England, under Charing Cross –
A three-tiered circuit ranged by packs of men
And boys who came to dance. I ended up
In a basement somewhere off the Chepstow Road,
And woke to the first snow-fall of the year.
I came to London for a long weekend
And stayed; met someone famous who was kind,
And took a boring job in Portland Place.
I went, on summer nights, to Hampstead Heath,
Where pints of beer at Jack Straw’s Castle gave
To sex under the tents of holly trees –
Shadows of hands that flowered through the dusk:
No names, no contracts, but each parting hug
Was less a token of civility
Than an act of love.
Later, in Amsterdam,
In crowded cellars on the Warmoesstraat,
The rules were different – a more serious art,
Practised in uniform. The smell of leather
An aphrodisiac keen as the scent of leaves;
And still, the magic of indifference.
It still goes on – wherever hands can find
Response of hands; hold, in the hollow silence,
A tangible warmth, the heartbeat in the dark
Where death has entered, ringing the playground bell.
It hurts the ear. It echoes through the woods.

I stare at death in a mirror behind the bar
And wonder when I sacrificed my blood,
And how I could not recognize the face
That smiled with the mouth, the eyes, of death –
In Manchester, London or Amsterdam.
I do not hate that face, only the bell.

Adam Johnson
(from Neil Powell’s Gay Love Poetry)

The Playground Bell in the poem is Death, a light, yet deeply moving metaphor. The very familiarity of the bell, from all our childhoods - remember how harsh it was, cutting across our playing, breaking up the fun, blotting out the sunlight, pushing us back into the dark drudgery of classrooms - is what gives it its impact when it means Death, ending our revelries, sending us to the dark.

Yet the poem is not a depressing one. It is elegiac, yet not self-indulgent as the poet looks back over his - so short - life with both clear eyes and affection. Its the story of a small town coming of age as a gay man, something many of us would relate to, at least in parts. Some of us did seek out older men, some did have indulgent mothers, many of us did find kind older 'sisters' and did go out looking for gay spots that we knew were sleazy yet irresitable.

And yes, when we were there, there was the excitement of connecting with a foreigner, someone out of our scheme of things, therefore glamorous, never mind if his reality there was the same as ours here. He was still:

that rare prize – a genuine foreigner
On holiday, was worth the taxi ride
To some remote hotel. Leaving in secret,
Before breakfast, pocketing an address
(In Paris!) I would never write to, a poignant act.

And then after a while, after we saved up or got lucky, we did manage to make a trip to one of the big gay destinations and because we were young and good looking and easily impressed we often "met someone famous who was kind". And then moved on, to regular, if boring jobs, and got into more hard core scenes and found ourselves part of a world and...

I hope what happened next happens less and less these days, but I don't know. Johnson was of the generation when AIDS first came and guys like him who "sacrificed my blood" could claim not to have known what could happen. Its not like that today, yet guys keep getting infected and yes, its manageable, yes its not the death sentence it was then, but still the playground bell will ring too often, too soon for too many.

Reading this poem I remembered what a young guy I once knew said. He had recently come on the scene, he loved having sex and he seemed to be a fairly together guy, yet he could be strangely fatalistic. And he told another friend of mine one day that he thought he would get the virus and he almost wanted to bareback, knowingly, with someone who was positive. But why, my other friend asked. "Because I just want to know when and I want to know who," the guy said.

I found that that chilling and deeply distressing that he could be so fatalistic as to want this. I hope others don't feel that way ever, yet reading this poem reminded me, in some way, of what he wanted and why. Johnson does wonder whose was the face who gave it to him - not because he hates that person, but like that young guy he just wants to know. What that guy did was part of his life, the life that he loved and will now leave, never hating it, only hating the bell that will come to end it all.

Vikram

PS: I took this poem from Neil Powell's excellent collection of gay poetry. Powell evidently knew Johnson and he chose this poem as the last one in the collection, and also included one by himself in memory of Johnson:


Hundred River
In memory of Adam Johnson 1965-93

We came to Hundred River though a slow October,
when earth is scented with everybody’s past;
when late scabbed blackberries harden into devil’s scars,
untasted apples rot to bitter toffee.

Across reed-beds a track of blackened railway sweepers,
a plank-bridge lapped by barely stirring water;
swans gargling silently in their fine indifference;
above, a sky of urgent discursive geese.

Now the year has turned again and I am alone here,
where willow-herb’s dry white whiskers drift over
The brick-red spikes of sorrel and the gossiping reeds;
and the river sullen, muddied after rain.

No movement in the woods but stealthy growth of fungus,
hesitant leaf-drop, distant scuttle of deer:
In one marble, stained oak-leaf I sense gigantic change,
and in the drizzle feel the season fracture.

Neil Powell

[Rish]

I Still

By Gene Valentine

July 2004


I still ...
miss you even if you don't miss me.
think of you even if you don't think of me.
wonder whether you were really my special friend or just
another man playing pretend?

I won't believe that it was a lie, that all the love,
passion, lust, tears,
laughter, & joy you gave me were untrue but where are you
now? I'm still here
waiting, wondering where you've been & do you still call
yourself my friend?

I still ...
question if you really cared when I became sick & if so,
why were we over so quick?
need you to hold me & tell me how you'll be there 'til
the end.
long to hear your voice again.

It's been 333 days & 999 pills. The virus is at bay now,
but like all enemies
I know that it's lurking in the shadows of my t-cells.
I wonder did this virus touch you too? & if so what will
you do?
Did the meds make you sick? Did you take as many pills as
I or was it 999x3?
I wonder did you sleep well or were you in my same hell?

I still ...
miss you even if you don't miss me.
think of you even if you don't think of me.
want you to be my friend even if you can't make love to
me again.

I still ... I still ... I still ...

[Rish]

For Saagar, who has written on these forums, this is dedicated to your predicament and your love.

To a Lover Who is HIV-Positive
By Alfred Corn

You ask what I feel.
Grief; and a hope
that springs from your intention
to forward projects as assertive
or lasting as flesh ever upholds.

Love; and a fear
that the so far implacable
cunning of a virus will smuggle away
substantial warmth, the face, the response
telling us who we are and might be.

Guilt; and bewilderment
that, through no special virtue of mine
or fault of yours, a shadowed affliction
overlooked me and settled on you. As if
all, always, got what was theirs.

Anger; and knowledge
that our venture won't be joined
in perfect safety. Still, it's better odds
than the risk of not feeling much at all.
Until you see yourself well in them,
love, keep looking in my eyes.