BILL*
In winter 2000, you had a terrible backache. You came over to my apartment for a yoga treatment. You didn't have any exercise clothes, so you stripped to your boxer shorts. There was just enough room in my bedroom. After you did a few asanas and chanted so-hum, in corpse pose, I massaged your shoulders and smoothed the skin across your forehead. That night, you sent me your poem, “Ha.” Every so often I’d open the mail, and there would be a poem. “I just want to be a nice woman living in Chelsea,” you wrote. “she brings a pillow, tucks me in, grownups whisper whisper, then morning morning. We check into hotel but we don’t you know . . .” For years I couldn’t find that poem. I first met you through Lewis. At a time when he needed our support, we’d both talk to him on the phone every night. One day when we were lunching at Angelicas, you told me how you always had an imaginary friend. In Sunset Land with You, it was Abe Lincoln. Abe’s there to talk to Billy about the war in Iraq, and the last war, and all those wars before, about those dying, about his loneliness as a young man, “Seems like them fairies, they always / need saving,” says Lincoln. Your parents were immigrants from Russia, your father a house painter, your mother a seamstress in the garment district. You were born in 1931. You grew up in the Bronx. You worked taking orders in a lightbulb factory. You were gay. You wrote a poem every day. All moods. All personal. All lyrical. All Bill. In a coffee shop at night, in your poem, “Born,” you watch two women kiss and you write “I stop to write think tiny souvenir of our life on earth.” Your poems are collections of these souvenirs of our life on earth. You sail over the city like a modern-day Whitman. At the end of In Sunsetland: “& now by this dark church, St. Mark’s / They say you are haunted, St. Mark’s / they say the ghosts of great poets wind down your stairways.” Sometimes I dream I’m walking into the back hall of St. Mark’s, our poetry church. I get shivery just thinking about it. You are there, Lewis is there, all our poet friends are there. We are greeting each other.
*Bill Kushner
KELLY*
Recently you told me that all you can do now is go from the car to the bar. A few months ago, you could still walk a few blocks. But with only one fully functioning lung, you’re often short of breath. Still, you light a cigarette and have a beer. Back in the mid ‘80s, when I met you, you were in grad school, teaching at Wayne State and bartending at Alvins. You were also a performing musician and a poet. We liked each other. I think you published one of my poems in the Wayne Review, but I can’t find the issue. You once told me that drinking was part of the culture you’d grown up with. A lot of the guys in the Cass Corridor were drinkers. After a while, you dropped out of school. Once when you came to visit me in Brooklyn, on our way home from Bradley’s Jazz Club, I hit my head on a pole in the subway station and started crying. You consoled me and later sent me a poem about that moment. I loved that poem, but I can’t find it anymore. And you can’t find it either. I’ve never liked alcohol. It undoes me. It makes me unhappy. Last July when we had lunch in a sandwich shop in Corktown, we talked about our difficulties breathing. We talked about friends and family. Even with the loss of your daughter and severe health problems, you are still lighthearted. I admire that. I’m always trying to hold on to what I’ve lost. Then you gave me a new poem you had written to replace the lost one, sweet, thoughtful, yes, but not the one you had written for me when you were 28 years old. Some things just can’t be replaced.
*Kelly Craig
JESSE
You were a poet and once a boxer. Tough, but also tender. I liked the way you laughed. We met at Cafe Pick Me Up to talk about Long News and poetry and one thing led to another. We both had difficult childhoods. We both liked to travel. You used to have a wolf you called wolf. I remember meeting you at the Poetry Project on New Year’s Eve and then walking back with you to my place. I often misread your humor. I don’t like being teased. You stayed with me for a couple of weeks before you left for an extended trip in Thailand. We didn’t make any promises except to write. Several letters and then nothing. I called a friend who said he had received a letter, and you had OD’d and were in a hospital in Thailand. I called your sister; your family was working with U.S. officials for your return. When you were back in San Francisco, I visited you in the hospital. You asked me to help you escape. Months later when you were back in New York, I met you in front of St. Mark’s Book Shop. You wanted to see me again. Maybe I was making a mistake. You told me I had issues with trust. You were probably right. It was cold outside. You were standing on the corner in the snow watching me as I turned around and walked away. Every so often there’s a phone call or an e-card from you. I have over a hundred pages of emails from the late ‘90s. We must have had some unresolved karma between us in a past life. If so, we didn’t make much headway during this lifetime, but maybe the next.
