A Lover Dead in His Twenties
After Adrienne Rich
1.
Just before they signed away
your right to
life,
you thought to hide hints
behind your
gasps
because you knew
I loved to lean
into you,
to listen actively
as it was the closest
we could ever be.
2.
The grain of your voice:
I did not know that
memorials bore
such textures.
(The ivy has already
strangled your
name.)
3.
The planes of you
were changing,
but you chose never
to make much of it
because that wasn’t how
you were raised:
to outline yourself in
enough green
to be envied,
enough red
to be a target.
A shot
in the back is
the present’s
plain language.
I learned from you
that being a cipher
could be a powerful
desire.
4.
Wojnarowicz said
when it was all over,
he wanted us to
just drop
his body
on the steps
of the fucking FDA,
but I don’t know
if I have the
heart
to do that to you,
you,
you
(who I failed to
love with any
grace)
even as your body is something
sharper now than it ever was in life
because you refuse the right to
amnesia,
the linchpin of
home and country
reddened rusty
by your and our brothers’
tainted blood,
for our touching
needed to be untouching
until they were distant forms
that only became
hard fact
in the flows of longing.
5.
How am I supposed to
cast this flower upon your soil,
how do I tell the truth of you
when the very words I need
were the ones that once
bound you,
hurt you,
stole away your name?
eulogy:
true praise.
6.
By the time you could not move,
you no longer bothered with
the headlines,
cheap pundits
because the story
still eludes
the dainty fingers
of press and camera:
you were already
too busy
cleaving hard
to that imperceptible
space beyond
their line of sight.
7.
A warrior
burying
a warrior:
(no, that’s not right.)
you would want
me to write,
however inexact
or exacting,
about a life
beyond reproach
so that none of us
must apologize
for doing nothing
wrong.
Travis Chi Wing Lau received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania and is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Alongside his academic writing and public scholarship, his poetry has appeared in Glass Poetry, The New Engagement, Nat. Brut, Matador Review. His chapbook, The Bone Setter, was recently published with Damaged Goods Press. [travisclau.com/@travisclau]
Note: This poem was previously published in Glass Poetry for the Writers Resist series.