and talked about pornography, and movie stars.

What Was

WHAT WAS

The streets fill with cabs and limos,

with the happy laughter of the very drunk;

the benches in Washington Square Park,

briefly occupied by lovers, have been reclaimed

by men who stretch out coughing under the Chronicle.

We’re sitting on the cold slab

of a cathedral step, and to keep myself

from kissing you I stare at the cartoony

blue neon face of a moose, set over the eponymous

restaurant, and decide on self-pity

as the best solution to this knot

of complicated feelings. So much, my love,

for love; our years together recede,

taillights in the fog that’s settled in. I breathe

your familiar smell—Tuscany Per Uomo,

Camel Lights, the sweet reek of alcohol—and keep

from looking at your face, knowing

I’m still a sucker for beauty. Nearby, a man decants

a few notes from his tenor sax, honking his way

through a tune meant to be melancholy. Soon

I’ll drive home alone, weeping and raging,

the radio twisted high as I can stand it—

or else I’ll lean toward you, and tell you

any lie I think will bring you back.

And if you’re reading this, it’s been years

since then, and everything’s too late

the way it always is in songs like this,

the way it always is.

So What

SO WHAT

Guess what. If love is only chemistry—

phenylethylamine, that molecule

that dizzies up the brain’s back room, smoky

with hot bebop, it won’t be long until

a single worker’s mopping up the scuffed

and littered floor, whistling tunelessly,

each endorphin cooling like a snuffed

glass candle, the air stale with memory.

So what, you say; outside, a shadow lifts

a trumpet from its case, lifts it like an ingot

and scatters a few virtuosic riffs

toward the locked-down stores. You’ve quit

believing that there’s more, but you’re still stirred

enough to stop, and wait, listening hard.

31-Year-Old Lover

31-YEAR-OLD LOVER

When he takes off his clothes

I think of a stick of butter being unwrapped,

the milky, lubricious smoothness of it

when it’s taken from the fridge still hard

the way his body is hard, the high

tight pectorals, the new dimes of the nipples pressed

into his chest, the fanning of the muscles underneath.

I look at his arms, shaped as though a knife

has slid along the curves to carve them out,

deltoids, biceps, triceps, I almost can’t believe

that he is human—latissimus dorsi, hip flexors,

gluteals, gastrocnemius—he is so perfectly made.

He stands naked in my bedroom and nothing

has harmed him yet, though he is going

to be harmed. He is going to have a gut one day,

and wiry gray hairs where the soft dark filaments

flow out of him, the cream of his skin is going

to loosen and separate slowly, over a low steady flame