Outside Seine Books on Euclid, here in St. Louis, there is a dilapidated bust of James Joyce, a deglittered teal-looking copper that, I think, is a nice picture of the city itself, this one where I’ve now lived for eleven years, and here on Euclid it’s quaint, quiet, cold and not altogether clear above me, a late winter sky full of junky clouds that let up every now and then to show what blue is possible behind them, so it’s here I’m standing keeping company with the bust of Jimmy J, and I’ve gotten the news my old friend Z has dropped dead in St. Paul, an aneurysm at 33, so I’m here with the effigy of A Master yet still alone, and the little placard that Sam my favorite bookseller at Seine likes to put outside on the sidewalk with a quote, in order to sell people on the idea of pith, imagination, romance, whatever can be found inside of a book, spells in white chalk on its blackboard framed by what seems to be

*The sun set in the
sea; the same odd
sun rose from the
sea, and there was
one of it and one
of me¹*

newly sanded plywood, but it doesn’t matter what the board’s made of, what anything here is made of because I am lost, up and gone, to somewhere coastal and far from here, this landlubbed place where lube is too expensive and oysters suspiciously cheap, back to the sea where I watch this Elizabeth Bishop news of the day lead me by the hand along wooden plank paths striping dunes brown where they are otherwise full of green, recently planted goldenrods and beachpeas and bluestems, so I am here and what, eleven, twelve, no no too young, fifteen, one summer, middle August, though maybe it wasn’t Z and it was A then who wore my navy blue sweatshirt and whose hands I cupped to keep from late Atlantic winds so we could succeed in our mission to get high and lose our minds to the warmth of touch where fingers were Martian rovers the first to tread their marks and where we laughed to mean that feels good, but no, this Elizabeth Bishop news of the day has brought me here to find only Z, only ever Z, who had escaped to the middle of the country and though I hadn’t heard from Z in years, over a decade,

*The sun set in the
sea; the same odd
sun rose from the
sea, and there was
one of it and one
of me*

it is immediate as now that my hands are sixteen tucked safely inside Z’s pants cupping a strong ass whose feel the cool cotton smooth of underwear and hands doing the same to this back side of me and was that erotic I remember thinking for years and were we not kissing no we were not so what were we convinced of ourselves doing then, I don’t know, and yet how many times had we slept together with love though without sex, and yet how many times had we, always with alcohol, indeed kissed one another or placed wagers upon the other’s nipples with our tongues without mutual admission that it seemed our mouths were shaped and divinely proportioned for each other’s parts, I don’t know anymore of this without knowing of

that fall break, mid-college, back home our tiny beach town in Delaware, an impossible windswept place with bars named things like The Miracle and whose air was scrubbed clean by the salted loogies of quietly cresting Atlantic waves, whose houses could never rid themselves of the heartknockingly-soft sand that made no sense next to our sweatshirts and addictions to WWE or Ravens Football, our plagues of rough love and dens of illness and deep need for an ocean breeze in winter to knife us open and be filled with gentle moonlight, yes, that fall break there in that place we were partying inside at B’s house, the attic, and I fell into Z’s lap several times, permission of my head resting on Z’s center so my head could feel Z, but that was all I’d be permitted there in front of everyone, so I was marooned and Z’s twin, K, who I never found unattractive solely never let myself think of K that way because Z was my friend after all though of course I did think of K that way and when I did think of K this night I found I had been thought of too and we were eventually caught somewhere at 2am undoing ourselves and I realized only after it was done I did this because I’d figured maybe K could be Z, that this was the closest I could really get to Z since there was always something left over and empty when we were together, so maybe I could find some of Z under this tongue that was, after all, so genetically similar to Z, and I scared myself when I realized I hadn’t even cared how I’d used K, and that I knew this and did it all the same because I needed Z and I was had at whatever I needed to do to get to Z, but after this I only found silence, that Z’s tongue for me had been cut out for us, so we never spoke again, rage of silence I hadn’t before known, aside from pleasantries and heartknockingly-short check-ins on what had, over the years, sunk into Z’s alarmingly happy marital condition and

my own life of mid-western double-love and hospital consultancy, but now it’s over, and so far from Z I feel something rises above me, the currents of ocean water, and what do I do with the fact that we never spoke of this memory of my transgression in drinking, of this transgression of my drinking in memory, of my drinking in memory of this transgression whereby something deep was broken and I could never be anything but the weight of betrayal and how I’d never know what Z had really ever once thought of me, and since I did not want to drown Z, boulder of past I was, I found I could never say, and now gone, am beyond this plea: come down Z, Z, come down, to this place where water becomes pressure becomes too thick and tight and heavy for light, to here, this place become so dense there is nowhere at all that is not our bodies, and so we are together, but we cannot see it.

¹Excerpted from the poem “Crusoe in England” by Elizabeth Bishop, once and always seen on a favorite bookstore’s advertising board.

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