April 5.

On the skids,

that’s how I describe it to myself,
the wrecked body I wear, the ruin
I affect as style.  You know, how
the beautiful’s a symbol of the good?

or so some thinker might have it,
which explains how it is that I find you,
putting on your trousers, nonetheless so
utterly sublime.  Yet, to be honest, most days,

as I find myself crying in the car again,
I imagine little else but the grief,
destiny of everything. Here, the classics

can be useful, as when Aeneas tells his friends,
shipwrecked, starving, having lost almost all,
but surviving it:  perhaps one day you’ll delight
even in remembering this:

or David Johanssen, strolling into the session,
addict harrowed by too much rehab,
wearing sunglasses, skinny as the cigarette
he smokes, but still standing,
having dodged death and seizing
one more chance to play, to say:

take a good look at my good looks
then close your eyes
keep the picture in your mind
‘cause I’ll be gone

One more chance to add lines to the doomed canzone,
to try a recipe for the son who’ll soon be gone.
One more garden to neglect, one more surprising
rogue geranium, springing pink-flowered in the lawn.
One more spate of tears, and then another:

this body, one day I will think of it as the last
beautiful, the late gladdening, the former
sleeping naked in summer and the previous
dreaming of spring: and you,

in your trousers, turning to see: