Cousin, I remember
the first drunk:
more than either of us
might say of many to follow.
Both of us fresh
off some new amorous
sorrow: you,
knees like river
weeds, down on the bank, chanting
“I Love You,
Peggy Sue,” wretched whore
of a tune that we loved,
it’s true; I, past standing,
raising the stolen jug
and struggling up
words as if from under
the Atlantic, that one last
hit was left and did you want it.
The moon a mere scratch
on the blue-black gulf
of sky, but I could see
your eyes and the dark skin
that would turn
still darker with hootch
at the end, as you turned:
“Kill it,” you said and said, “By God
we have to find some girls!”
Rut only small fry
—giggling innocent town boys—came.
“O damn
a kid!” you cried,
giving lame chase.
Then the cosmic thick
conversation before unconsciousness
from which for years we would wake,
proud and unsick, stars
cool swimmers
over the pastures and lawns.
It was summer.
That dawn we felt we’d won one,
and at long last evening
come, we bubbled
with laughter at the tiny
radio beaming the Hour
of Revival from deepest
blackest downtown, “The Reverend Melvin,
Pastor,” shouting,
“I, too
was a drifter, drenched in liquor
till something grabbed me,
turned me around!”
Turn to me, first friend,
and I’ll tell you something
grabbed me too.
(I have friends
who say it was God,
but I don’t know,
it didn’t grab you. . . .)
Time to go,
time to turn
the choir off, choiring triumph
that Pharoah lay forever
still, his eyes gummed shut with salt.
Time to cruise
the asphalt, steaming,
violent-loined, with no one to love
except each other.
You pointed a steady
finger at the dial:
“Enough of these losers.
Kill it.” The crackling
tapered off
like remotest storm.
One kills so much:
friendships, time,
the moist erotic hungers
of an August, wives, lives.
I seem to survive, and thought
I’d killed off you.
I have a couple of kids. One plays
“We Are the Champions,
My Friend.” Loud and louder,
day after day.
I love him. Friend,
gone downriver
a decade, and I
turned back to dry land,
I don’t know why: Somewhere
the woman you damn
near drowned in grief is raising
a daughter,
my cousin, once removed.
I don’t know her name,
but think
it has Victoria in it.
Or Victory.
Let’s call it Victory here.
For you. For me.