Alex Dimitrov

Night Call

When we did then go after each other in those most unreasonable hours.
Twice at the Lowell hotel: bringing you uptown, 
bringing you down. Let me walk this situation
and touch each window from within. “I hate funerals. 
I’m glad I won’t have to go to my own. Only, I don’t want one—
just my ashes cast on waves.” And that was the beautiful child. 
For the short while then, briefly, like the inside of a wrist turned toward you
we forgot we were awful people. Now isn’t that nice, 
how animals walk toward what calls them by a name no one can give. 
Part of the menu, wardrobe, backdrop…
what did we ask for in fact? 
Not always will the sky stay where you live. 
On some ship that’s so far down there, where the elevator stops just once. 
Lead us into death now said the priest, and the men all wove it in their hair. 
Outside the Spanish Steps we took photographs for everyone who wasn’t there. 
And I watched a small bird run that yard without its head
so the blood could be a blessing. So you saw someone you love kill something too. 
When the head goes there are muscles that keep going. 
One of them would call the other if the night called for a smoke. 
Remind me then…what is this? Our agreement. 
You can watch me while I read you something. 
You can have me while I’m here. 
Love is difficult for brutes like us—with or without assets.  
Agree or disagree? 
How the bay made the day feel wide, unlike a tunnel. 
My voice had nothing to say after the beep. 
Or let me show you: unlimited intimacy
is a kind of poison. So is counting checks or pills or weeks. 
And many critics felt he wasted his gifts by going to too many parties
and appearing on too many talk shows.
Yet in some jeweled corridor of their lives
where time was a freedom and hellmate: 
the fish circled, openmouthed, and never left the aquarium. 
Every lover is a stranger, every stranger a lover all over again. 
So I’ve been popular and unpopular.
You’ll be a body on the earth and in the earth too. 
(It’s mostly the same thing, mostly the same fear.)
Voracious and bound. They didn’t know it
(and it wasn’t a choice) how we’re truly impossible. 
We had to. They had to live here.