IF I COULD WRITE YOU A HAPPIER ENDING
By Mary Foulk
IF I COULD WRITE YOU A HAPPIER ENDING
we would be sitting on a porch in Maine,
the lake house of our imaginings from
those Sunday afternoons at the 11th street bar,
grandmother’s antique rockers timed
to orange Sebago ripples,
toasts of Chardonnay
to our mother
who loved us (as best she could),
sounds of our partners making dinner,
in the background hummed commentary
on our shared sibling language, our knowing
looks of queer childhood (survival),
my children begging for an uncle’s story,
not the one dissolving slowly in its silver frame
IF I COULD WRITE YOU A HAPPIER ENDING
the story would be alive in its silver frame
smiling for my camera
the beautiful boy freed
to be the right kind of boy
to be the right kind of man
a marching queen
shawled by rainbows
and a lover’s tender hands
gone the days of urgent cocks
in graffitied stalls, bar shadows of
nameless numbers who never called—
a closet that swallowed you whole—
then cremation’s fire, then mute dirt—your heart attack
at forty, these attacks, your heart, just forty
IF I COULD WRITE YOU A HAPPIER ENDING
your heart, just forty,
beginning to break
open to a lover’s
moaned reassurance
of your worth, to graze
in the dimpled
light, map of your every
angled cartography of skin,
horizon of sheets
this horizon
my squinting eyes search
any compass point
to return to
after your death—my own body
crawling towards that blue black
IF I COULD WRITE YOU A HAPPIER ENDING
crawling towards that blue black,
it is morning or night,
the planes did not strike,
our father dazzles still
by Sebago’s lake light,
our mother, dancing slowly
to her shrine’s
gentle men (gone)
these word temples of love,
your hand in mine,
mine in Alyson’s,
Alyson’s in our children’s,
we walk again together
along the unknowable horizon
IF I COULD WRITE YOU A HAPPIER ENDING
the horizon, unknowable,
yet your identity known,
no coming out, no regret,
no letters of explanation
inked with shame and
midnight’s kneeling, no streaked
guilt, no hiding in empty closets,
no need, no passing, travel without
fear, no tensed shoulders, dropping of hands,
language unrecognizable, my roommate
my friend, no either/or, just
both/and, alive/not
dead, alive
IF I COULD WRITE YOU A HAPPIER ENDING
not dead, alive,
we would have finished
our beers and the last drags of
cigarettes, waved good-bye
to Sierra the bartender who
laughed at our Sunday reveries, then
wandered down 11th in search of pasta
and other queers
that one I would fuck
that one I would marry
our little game, those evenings
under Manhattan streetlight
I love you’s, indelible collection,
our (ceaseless) salvation of Sundays