From the First, the Body Was Dirt

For T.S. Whose hands touched, first, the head of the penis, the shaft? And was it soft or shale?  More rock than clay. And who pinched first into their place the small cups at the base of the ass? Who was it got down there, on whose knees, and blew— and was that passion or panic, the machine that drove those exhalations? —and how could we rate the power of that breath—breeze or gale or a whisper like the song the little boy sings to the beetle, whose small legs moved in tune like his legs, the legs on that first body, must have moved, if they did move, when the dust settled. In my mind everything’s become enormous. But was it ever small like that, the first body? Did it ever sit close to the ants and their piles of dirt from which that body had come? You were a small boy once, I suppose. You were dirty from the start. You showed me how to use a cock ring, and why. How, without ever paying for a room, to spend two weeks in any city. How two men could fuck and continue to face each other directly —took my body and showed me, my back on a table, my knees by my head. Stretched me into seeing you were more than a dog. You must be dead by now, though I don’t know whose hands prepared you. Whose fingers fingered, for the final time, all that dark and kinky hair? If the first body was made of dirt, in order to plumb the hollow of that first throat, whose thumb first lodged inside the hinge of that first mouth to force it open? To make the tongue, so it could work, who shoved inside that mouth the shit of a hundred thousand worms?