Red Shift

Here I am at 8:08 p.m. indefinable ample rhythmic frame The air is biting, February, fierce arabesques on the way to tree in winter streetscape I drink some American poison liquid air which bubbles and smoke to have character and to lean In. The streets look for Allen, Frank, or me, Allen is a movie, Frank disappearing in the air, it's Heavy with that lightness, heavy on me, I heave through it, them, as The Calvados is being sipped on Long island now twenty years almost ago, and the man smoking Is looking at the smilingly attentive woman, & telling. Who would have thought that I'd be here, nothing wrapped up, nothing buried, everything Love, children, hundreds of them, money, marriage- ethics, a politics of grace, Up in the air, swirling, burning even or still, now more than ever before? Not that practically a boy, serious in corduroy car coat eyes penetrating the winter twilight at 6th & Bowery in 1961. Not that pretty girl, nineteen, who was going to have to go, careening into middle-age so, To burn, & to burn more fiercely than even she could imagine so to go. Not that painter who from very first meeting I would never & never will leave alone until we both vanish into the thin air we signed up for & so demanded To breathe & who will never leave me, not for sex, nor politics nor even for stupid permanent estrangement which is Only our human lot & means nothing. No, not him. There's a song, 'California Dreaming', but no, I won't do that I am 43. When will I die? I will never die, I will live To be 110, & I will never go away, & you will never escape from me who am always & only a ghost, despite this frame, Spirit Who lives only to nag. I'm only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn't ask for this You did I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing will ever change That, and that's that. Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless I slip softly into the air The world's furious song flows through my costume.