All those Friday and Saturday nights, all those
drive-in movies; all those pizzas and pitchers
of cola; and afterward, all those miles on
rural roads and c.b. conversations he
gave me that summer;
too many said far too much too often that
our friendship was impossible because we
were so different and our intimacy
was unacceptible because our bodies
shared X Y the same.
Each time he took his shoes he loved me; but---
shoeless, shirtless, that one afternoon, he stood
on that flat stone in Verging Creek's shallows, his
distressed jeans' frayed cuffs and dark socks submerged just
cuz I asked him to . . . .
Starward-Led
Author's Notes/Comments:
I realize the last line is ungrammatical and written in sub-standard English; it s just an echo of how we talked then.
The situation described in the poem was forcibly halted on Thursday, September 9th, 1976 when my parents transported me an hour's interstate drive Northeast of our town to the campus of the university from which I graduated in 1980. My soul had only one resource with which to deal with the trauma of that enforced separation: the handle, Starwatcher, which BlueShift Had helped me receive on Saturday, July 10th---the first of our "drive-in and drive around" weekend nights. When I returned home on Tuesday, November 23rd, 1976, I found that the situation I had left behind was still, blessedly, the same, and BlueShift's affections unchanged.