The Dead Remember Brooklyn

It is the great arguments we are proud of, over a nibbled peach, hair in the comb, a faulty lube job; the reconciliations were always naked in borrowed rooms, sometimes in Queens or Staten Island, we touched each other shyly—we reminded each other of loneliness and funk and beautiful pigeons with oil-slick necks, cooing bitterly— but there we lost each other in forgiveness; keeping score, being wounded even in triumph, walking home down leafy avenues etched with the faint double line of extinct trolleys, caressing carved hearts under a sheen of sap with a ragged nail, sleeping alone, choosing the dream of betrayal, entering by the wide door and waking dead—there we were superb. In Brooklyn we held our own.