JAMES MERRILL

Phillip Kalantzis Cope

Would-be messages from the East Village, in 140 characters or less.

…have taken over, man! You can’t do without me,
forget about it, dude, you’re screwed, don’t you
understand anything? I own you

Neither a fighter nor a lover, me. Presenting: 180 lbs. of
Humanity. Single, sober, solvent, rents a flat. Touch-
starved. That’s that

Although he could not understand the financial
information Mr. Li was giving him, he suspected Mr. Li
did not fully understand it either

When he informed him he was moving to France for six
months, Mr. Li looked genuinely puzzled. “France?
Why would you want to go there?”

Finding it difficult to frame a simple answer to such a
complex question, he was polite. “Oh, you know, I just
feel like going somewhere”

A decade unmet, fearful of Time’s traces,
they settled on a dinner date
in which they would dine in different places

… coiled among murky translucent shells ripped from
shrimp bought on Canal piled like dozens of used
condoms in a bowl on the kitchen table

The first warm days of Spring can be a scary thing.
Overnight, so calmly – as if they had never been – coats
and hats are shed

and each body’s truth revealed. Eyes grow busier,
bolder. They meet at crossroads. They mate. Cheeks
susceptible turn pink, then red

Uptown, you breathe the clean clear air of money. Saw
James Merrill there once, on the street. Imagine what he
could have done with a tweet

He can only hear through the air shaft, not see: The song
of life as sung by students from F.I.T. Loud, obnoxious,
excited, cheerful… young

After she died, he sensed (just once) her watching him
from the sky above 3^rd Avenue. For days she stayed
with him, like the sun’s warmth.

But now three years have passed since her burial
overseas, in an old French city, and the sky above the
East Village, his home, is empty