Drawings: For John Who Said to Write about True Love

“The writer. It’s a cul-de-sac,” you wrote that winter of our nation’s discontent. That first time I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great named cats you gassed in the move.I couldn’t keep them. You explained so I understood. And what cat never loved your shell-like ways, the claw of your steady fingers,firme from the rasping of banjos and steady as it goes from the nose to the hair to the shaking tip. My favorite tale was of the owl and the pussycat in love in a china cup cast at sea, or in a flute more brittle, more lifelike and riddled with flair, the exquisite polish of its gaudy glaze now puzzled with heat cracks, now foamed opalescent as the single espresso dish you bought from Goodwill. What ever becomes of the heart our common child fashioned, red silk and golden satin, the gay glitter fallen from moves, our names with Love written in black felt pen? Who gets what? Who knows what becomes of the rose you carried home from Spanish Harlem that morning I sat waiting for the surgeon’s suction. What ever becomes of waiting and wanting, when the princess isn’t ready and the queen has missed the boat, again? Do you still write those old remarks etched on a page of Kandinsky’s ace letting go? Like:Lorna meets Oliver North and she kicks his butt