Gussie

Note to Reader: This poem is from what might be a book of poems and poem-type things called Who Loves You Loves You Regardless, which is a line from the beautiful Thomas Lux poem, “Elegy for Frank Stanford.”

Gussie

You’ll be glad I think to know it is rarely in sorrow or woe
or regret or shame or what if what if or if only that I think of you, 

but with the plain critterly impulse to tell you something vaguely 
stupid or incriminating or embarrassing that would have 

tickled you, that would have made you laugh.  For instance: just yesterday, 
when I was coming through the security line in Des Moines, the emptiest security

line in America, they claim half a million souls I doubt it 
though, the scan lit up my crotch, as the small-town scans 

tend to do.  Madison, Wisconsin; Milwaukee.  Small-town
Midwest airports are where I would go if I was lonely

and needed some touch.  I have drafted a short story
in my head.  Anyway, yeah, lit up.  No, I don’t mean aroused.  

I mean the tv outside the giant autoclave showed my 
avatar’s groin illuminated in two places.  Hmmm.  The woman pointed 

at the lights and said sympathy-free you gotta wait.  
You’re lit up.  A skinny guy with glasses crooked on his face

pointed also at my (un)likeness with the lit-up crotch,
visibly disappointed, audibly too, sort of huffing and rolling 

his googly eyes behind his glasses enough you’d think 
he was the one about to be groped for our own safety.  

He harrumphed like mine was going to be the worst crotch 
he’d ever fondle.  He could just tell.  I ever tell you

how when I saw the Dalai Lama where the Hoosiers play 
he said I won’t have been the best Dalai Lama but 

I probably wasn’t the worst. Yeah he said that. He shook his head 
in what I perceived as, if not disgust, exasperation. Or 

exhaustion.  Anticipatory bereavement at the forthcoming
molestation.  He asked me if I wanted to go somewhere 

private, pointing at an unmarked door, considerate if obligatory, 
but I decided not to be shy.  I smiled and shook my head no, 

pleased from how he was coughing and huffing and clearing
his throat this was going to hurt him more than it was me.  

There was a kid I played college football with 
who had a pretty massive member and I picture him 

standing naked in the locker room with his hands on his hips 
like a superhero, grinning, all isn’t she a beauty?  

She was more handsome than beautiful. 
She looked like Harvey Keitel.  She looked older than whose 

appendage she was, who, being nineteen, was probably 
appendage to her.  His Keitel I mean.  Anyway: sweet dude, 

big dick, bum knee. He popped a tire his first year and limped 
one more season through.  Sometimes it evens out.  It’s been a few years 

now I’ve been saving up comparing in a poem or essay a dick 
to Elizabeth Bishop’s fish.  It came to me 

during a morning piss I think.  Or post-coital.  
Maybe a post-coital morning piss.  

In my opinion, it’s one of the twentieth century’s greatest
feats of description. Yeah that’s a doosh thing to say.

I can’t remember if you were into Bishop.  
Such attention is a kind of love said I can’t remember who 

though it’s obvious enough the attribution ought to be 
to the flowers, to the fish, grizzled and luminescent 

with the beauty of age, battered and venerable and homely 
is how Bishop puts it, who has several hooks stuck 

in his lip and dangling from those hooks 
a beard of fishing line.  I wonder was it annoying

every single time we ate together me telling you about the food 
dropped into your beard by brushing my hand over my chin.  
  
Anyway, I channeled my teammate as my groper 
kneeled before me and explained to me the process, 

front of hands, back of hands, all the way up cough cough 
inseam, front of, cough cough pants, etc.  He moved his hands 

in such a way that if he had been a bit more stoic, 
it might have seemed like the rite it is.  With this guy

there were no secrets: he wanted nothing to do 
with my fish.  Remember when we were watching The Dating Story 

and I was bitching about how stupid TV was and our roomie
said you could just change your mind?  Channeled him too I guess

as I smiled benevolently down upon the state rummaging 
my crotch in the wide open as he hated his job which I was too

supposed to hate and do but decided that day not to.  At that moment 
I enjoyed how disgusting me and my disgusting lit-up fish, my

rainbow rainbow rainbow—yeah, that’s from the Bishop poem; 
remember, at the end, the old grizzled fish having survived 

makes everything a rainbow, then/so she lets him go; weird
what a beautiful poem can make you believe—

were to him as he cough-coughed, cough-coughed, eyes averted 
from his inquiry as though to spare him something.  

Thinking about getting that CDL or opening maybe
a typewriter shop.  He said nothing like thank you or take

care or hope to see you around after our tryst, just
cough-cough alright you can go his eyes behind his glasses

already looking past me into the less awful future.   
Before I would have texted you something like 

Nuts cupped in Des Moines! or Handjob in the heartland!
and you would have texted back something like

Congrats loquat! Or, Congrats longan! I forget when those fruity
epithets were born but cherish the day. Love you 

honeydew out of the blue.  Love you lychee.  Maybe a follow-up
with some news about bathroom things.  How lucky to have a friend 

with whom you are mostly a teenager.  I picture you 
in the pub in Fishtown with the good vegan wings fresh 

from the hospital after eating all that Benadryl. I forget how much.
Too much but not enough.  You looked cute and kinda sharp

in a cardigan and button-down shirt, how some people 
swear you can spiff yourself into a good day.  You tried so hard.

Mouse, if that’s what they still call it, in your hair, a little
thinning.  Newly baggy pants rolled over crocs I think,

though in the last years you’d taken to wearing zero-drop 
athleisure shoes by Xero™, so it could have been those.  

I’m trying very hard to see you again but it was dark in there, 
and the time.  Elvis Costello glasses that always looked good on you.  

Your sleeves were rolled up not quite to your elbows 
and I noticed your smattered tattoos: your niece and nephews are all there

I think.  And I’m pretty sure one that said Jane’s Addiction
how they wrote it.  Skatery.  Good band, bad tattoo.  

Great band, terrible tattoo.  There’s a special place in Heaven
for people who get the names of bands tattooed on their

only bodies.  Also on your forearm I think is a line from a poem 
I wrote about you trying hard not to die of leukemia.  A riff 

on Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” about how living is the art, not dying.  
In my handwriting if memory serves. I can’t make out the line.  

It’s dark in there.  I must have scribbled the words for you 
to take to the shop.  On a legal pad, on computer paper, who knows. 

I hope I gave it a few whirls, given you were putting them on your body.
A friend told me she gave herself two tiny tattoos 

from ink made of her dog’s ashes.  Part wolf that dog.  
Some people snort them. They look like dots on her shoulders 

where wings might grow in. Or a wide-set pair of extra eyes.  
There was also a black sun which I can just barely make out

in one of the photographs my mother found in her drawers
after you died.  The earliest is of my brother’s high school graduation,

after which, on the pull-out couch, listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo, 
we had what we agreed, and continued for another thirty years to agree, 

was the loveliest nap of our lives. Our life.  But in this photo 
we are sitting at my folks’ dining room table. My head is

on your shoulder, my hand on your bicep, I am hammily 
looking stoned, and your smile is open and untroubled.  There was never

a cuter person. I don’t know who took the picture, 
though your smile makes me think it might have been my mother, 

who you loved.  Who loved you.  Poor Walt, she said. That kid never got a break.  
Your left hand rests on your right wrist, and beneath your pudgy fingers 

half a black sun.  Oh yeah.  You had a black sun, maybe the first tattoo 
you got if memory serves.  It’s dark in there. There is another book 

I would love though probably won’t write that scours the earth 
for photographs of you in shirt sleeves to recompose your tattoos.  

Much transpires in the search, which is—shorthand—a way to cope
with the loss.  There’s a moving book by Shane Crosley if you were alive 

I probably would have recommended.  Another by Sarah Manguso 
I must’ve mentioned, one of my favorite books. Her beloved 

jumped in front of a train.  Written in short entries, little prose
blocks, what the writer Wayne Koestenbaum might call fugues.  

Something about those fugues I love.  Wonder what
you’d’ve thought.  Anyway, I might never find all the tattoos 

so you might never be all the way gone.  One of the five times
you’ve come to me in a dream, four of us

were sitting on the steps outside my folks’ apartment
where we grew up, like when we were kids.  Yeah,

where we grilled those filet mignons you stole from work
and ate them with ketchup on potato rolls.

I don’t remember who the other two were, but I could
plug in possibles.  People from home I think.  Oh, Maurice’s mom

died.  Matt emailed me the obit.  Eighty-some.  Good long life.
You looked great, like in the photo, healthy, connected, listening

to everyone, chatty.  Happy.  And at some point I said, 
I can’t remember why, but it was sort of teacherly, 

a regrettable sometimes affect I cannot afraid to say shake, 
Well Walt, could you tell us something about being dead? 

And right then and there you started to decay, you started to die, 
to become dead, not as answer to my question, but, I think, 

on account of it.  I’ve forgotten now why I wanted to tell you 
that dream.  Maybe to tell you I dream of you.  Oh. 

Something to do with you being, or not, all the way gone.  
Eight or ten or twelve times of you trying to kill yourself, 

twenty years of you wanting to kill yourself and trying like hell
not to kill yourself I should say, half our friendship, dear god,

it’s hard not to try to wedge some kind of dumb light.  
Crack a joke. As you shiver and say the doctors think 

you might’ve had a small stroke.  Hard for you to read the menu.
You looked like Linus without his blanket.  Wobbled 

and put your hand out like you were dizzy
when you got up.  Hugged me like you were hanging on.

Blinked a lot.  Brow furrowed.  So small across the table you seemed 
trying to read the menu and not making eye contact with the server, 

youngish and female, who you thanked like fifty times.  I’m just saying.  
Relax.  It’s ok.  And dude cut it out with the Benadryl for god’s sake.  

Shit will fuck you up.  From your mouth the hummingbird of a giggle.  
The wren.  Then back to Linus.  Telling me how it went down.  Telling me

the conditions of your release from the hospital. Telling me 
you realized as you were dying that you wanted to live.  Not sure

what I said.  That’s good probably.  Or yeah man.  Wondering, 
probably, would it always be like this.  Somewhere in your note

you said something about me being a better friend to you 
than you were to me.  Which I know because you’re dead I shouldn’t say 

is probably true.  The nature of your fuck-up.  All those bastards 
yammering away inside your head made it hard sometimes 

to listen to the bastards outside of it.  The bastards 
inside were convincing, and resident.  Shitty roommates.  

I know those fucking assholes.  Spread out, leave their shit everywhere, 
never do the dishes god forbid vacuum or take out the compost.  

Blast their stupid music all hours.  That hit “kill yourself” 
on repeat, rippling the water in your glass.  That hit

“you’re worthless, you’re worthless, now die.”  I remember 
walking through the very lovely woods on campus as you told me 

over the phone one of those voices was occasionally mine.
You’re a burden we’d all be better off etc.  Though you sometimes

bugged me some I never wished you dead.  Literally never and some people 
I literally do.  But that tic of saying sorry a million times

kinda made me wanna kill you.  Sorry this sorry that.  Sorry here sorry there.
Maybe you felt sorry for everything there’s that but also 

not only.  A plea to be told a thousand times it’s ok I wonder.  
You’re ok, I wonder.  At the end of one of our last visits, 

two nights of slumber party, a good meal at Pho Xe Lua, 
one at the Greek place on Fairmount, a few walks, 

exasperated by the five millionth I’m sorry the five millionth it’s ok,
I told you, on the corner of 9th and Bainbridge, 

If you say sorry to me again I’m going to smack the shit out of you.  
How old friends sometimes have to do.  Oh, you said, looking down.  

My bad. Was that the last time I saw you alive?  Was that the last time
we hugged, your big head against my chest, how you did

toward the end there?  I forget what I said when you told me mine 
was among the voices. I should have said it is infuriating when a demon 

steals your voice.  Listened over the phone for the little wren
escaping from your body.  When I wrote that sentence about your laugh 

a little bird trilled a little song from the mulberry tree 
I’m pretty sure.  I’ll take it as a sign.  I forget 

the season of this conversation but the walkway through the woods is brick.   
When the crows return to campus in winter they shit everything

into a Jackson Pollock.  And walking through those woods
when they’re painting it’s hoods up.  You would have loved that.

Would have loved how the beech trees in winter hold onto
their papery leaves.  I try not to catalog everything you would have loved

because that seems somehow cruel.  To someone.  Beside the point.
But I can’t help it.  Like the kid working the airport kiosk at O’Hare

looking up from her phone when her flirty co-worker was griping this
or that she kept saying what the. The young guy working the back 

of the trash truck this morning singing loud in the dark
with that Seal song, “Kiss from a Rose.” How when we were

hauling a big file cabinet from my office down the street 
to a friend’s studio, and the dolly and cabinet toppled, two people 

stopped and helped, and a third asked if we needed more help.  
The man walking by, hood up, greeting me by raising,

softly, his fist into the air.  A lagoon of light in an intersection.
A bar of light on a limestone wall.  The woman in the café

excited to get a plant that grows like praying hands.  
The debate about how to pronounce kielbasa.  

The murmuration of light through the sycamore leaves 
on a windy day. That the freeze last night seemed not to touch 

the redbuds or serviceberries or the apple blossoms
or lilacs or, pray god, the pawpaw flowers which I was up in the night 

three times misting with a hose which they say wraps them in a 32 degree
jacket and protects them from the killing 26 or so outside of them.  

They kind of glinted like jewels in my headlamp as I tik-tik’d them 
with my fingernail.  Got soaked because our hoses suck.

One nozzle was busted and the other one got busted.  Twenty-six degrees
and water running down my sleeve into my armpit.

Tripped over and almost wiped out on account of the black raspberries.  
You would’ve loved that too.  Our schtick 

you fall I laugh you laugh I help you up.
There were times you looked at me like, look at you, all grown up.

About hosing the pawpaw blooms through the night might have been 
one of them.  That I was learning a little more how to care for someone.

Good job Hossy is how you said it.  
On second and third and fourth and fifth etc.

thought you might have been the better friend; if the shittier
listener, the more devoted.  Remember the time Stephanie couldn’t find the keys

to her car returning to the Philly airport one late night, she called me,
and I called you, who picked up, the sleeping etc. drugs just

taking hold.  You sounded twilit and mumbled in your high voice 
Ok Hossy, I think I have enough time, got in your car, drove the fifteen minutes

down 95, pulled up to the curb, handed Stephanie the keys, and passed out 
immediately in the passenger’s seat.  That was such a bad idea.

Mine. Or the one with Jay, hopping from rock to rock in the river
I got a bug in my ass to make a big, unlikely jump, too far.

A jump that if I missed I’d likely tumble into the river, and so convinced
you and Jay to get where I’d be landing and, if need be,

grab hold of me.  Save me.  We said spot.  You two got stationed 
on the tilted rock gritty with lichen, I leapt, and when Jay saw all at-the-time 

two-hundred and thirty pounds of me flying at him he hauled ass,
reasonably, evolutionarily.  But you stayed put, your hand out,

eyes squinting but open, like this might hurt.  Remember that. 
You would have sooner died than let me fall.  Remember

that.  Would do anything for me.  I don’t 
mean most anything. I mean anything.  What’s that feeling

gone.  Gone who only my mother, maybe, loves me more.  
Maybe.  Who loves me regardless.  Of everything.  Of anything. 

The rope untying from the dock and sinking into the black water.  
You the dock even if your ass could be unlistening goddamn.  

Sorry sorry sorry sorry shut the fuck up.  You harbor, 
busted and safe.  Despite the racket ripping off the plaster 

in your head never in more than forty years didn’t allow me 
entry.  Rest.  Dockage.  Retreat.  Refill.  Cover.  Care.  

Witness.  Forgiveness.  Home.  Love.  Need be 
or not.  I know I know my metaphors are a mess.  

What do you expect.

        Almost exactly seven months after you left 

Stephanie’s daughter found a black and white pitbull sprinting 
down a busy street on a frigid night a miracle he wasn’t hit.  He leapt 

in the car and fell asleep in her lap.  When I met the dog
as yet unnamed—he was curled in a ball in Stephanie’s office—

he growled, sniffed me, cuddled into me, then fell asleep.  
Snored very lightly how sometimes you would. 

A few times he shivered how you sometimes did 
when you were upset.  The skin beneath the fur on his snout was pink 

and irritated, like yours could be, those flakes of your face 
flecked into your beard.  Scratches all over his body. 

The pads of his feet raw and scabbed. His eyes 
huge pools of need, pools of please take care of me please.

My god, I thought; my god: you’d come back from death 
to me my heartbreak made me know.  Sprinted back to me

through the horror.  You, it was you. I was inches from naming him Wally, 
which Stephanie, listening with patience and curiosity that, writing it,

remembering it, makes me want to cry, was ready to co-sign.  
Wally’s a good name.  I kissed him ten thousand times and slid 

his soft ears through my fingers.  I shoved and mooshed and 
bludgeoned him with hugs.  I rubbed his tummy and his toes spread.  

His enormous head he needed hugged and hugged again and would 
drop on our laps or shove into our chests to let us know. He groaned

and grustled under the weight of my nuzzle.  He almost purred
and like a pitbull does smiled a big goofy smile that made me

smoosh him some more. Wallop him with hugs. We noticed 
that first week that though he was as yet barkless, tail-tucked, 

a’shiver, mopey, scared, glum, timid, plaintive, sleepy, 
feeble, clumsy, weak, infirm, shy, pathetic, skittish,

shitting worms, perplexed by stairs, up and down,
fumbling and graceless climbing onto a couch, spinning out
 
on the hardwood floor about which I swear to god though 
I mostly hate most rugs I was all we have to get rugs for him, 

for you, we have to carpet the house and build if he needs them 
steps or ramps onto the couch and bed

the doctors say he just had a minor stroke for god’s sake,
he’s been running the past seven months back to me 

from the dead dear lord, dear lord get him whatever he needs,
his poor feet, his poor face, he can’t do stairs, he’s trembling, 

he’s wobbly, hold him up, hold him—
despite all that your nearly namesake nearly always has 

at the tip of his dick a dot of cum.  A dab or droplet.  
Almost always he is with a dollup of dogcum which abates 

only after a piss, but briefly.  Then back to one of those Elmer’s
containers always with a smidge of glue at the orange tip 

about which he is not shy, nor do we try to make him so. 
We don’t want to be those parents.  Gooboy. Gooboy.  

Gussie’s unlopped adolescent nuts are like a velour egg, plush 
and velvety, taut, pert, dappled like an appaloosa trotting

behind his haunches which does not, the velour horse, 
nor its milky effects, seem to incline him especially

except ok fine sometimes to hump people or dogs.  
And he barely growls.  Dude is chill as hell, in most every way 

perfect, and, fundamentally huggy as he is, and endolloped, 
it looks in his dickhole like a drip of wax or smudge of icing—

this is a train of similes I could ride for a long time—
in addition to dabbing with his dick a dapple of dogcum

on our pillows, he will not infrequently though I’m pretty sure 
inadvertently paint with his dick a small wet streak of nut

on my thigh or wrist or forearm, which, if I don’t immediately notice
and wipe it off, will come to glisten like a sparkling 

filigreed bracelet.  A pearlescent, temporary tattoo made of jism
from the dog I swore to god and nearly cried when I did so

was you.  It’s you.  And needing these days always to be hugged,
having come through what you’ve gone through, he’s often

smearing his seed on me.  Which, my god, 
you would have lost your goddamned mind

with glee.  Gales of it.  Which, my god.  Who knows.  
Who knows. All those wrens and goldfinch and cardinal and sun-

tummied bluebirds sung at once from your only and beautiful body. 
All those rainbows, oh beautiful.

Oh only.