For Jim Hutt
I’ve tried, over and over. Is it because, when
I’m at the bottom of a well your hope blazes
the dark? Is it because what I feel for you is
deeper than the well? You flew to Pittsburgh
when my mother died. We drove her ashes
to Cheyenne, planted her next to my dad in
the cemetery on Pershing Avenue. We called it
The Cremains Tour. How you gloated when
the young ticket taker in Omaha gave me the
senior discount without my asking for it,
and charged you the regular price, though we’re
the same age. In Colorado we watched a thunder
storm roll over the prairie and knew it was my
mother’s last breath. You’d witnessed her rages,
knew how I found her drunk on the kitchen floor,
skirt ruffled over her hips, keening over my dead
father whom she hated/loved. You knew I needed
you on that drive. Or is it because you flew from
San Francisco to Pittsburgh when Judy was horribly
ill. I’d spend the day at the hospital, come home,
and find that you’d cooked dinner and made the
kitchen so clean it gleamed. Sixty years ago, your
locker was next to mine at St. Mary’s High. The other
good Catholic boys teased and mocked you. You say
that I was nice to you, that I was kind. I can’t remember
that time. But you have been my friend ever since.
Who else could I now razz about his golf obsession?
Who else could I accuse of playing with his putter
and compulsively washing his balls? Who else but
you could call me a fuckwit with hilarious impunity?
What other person in my life phones me just as I’ve
begun to phone him? How many times have we done
that? Are these the reasons I can’t write a poem about you?
Is it because you are a man that I love—will love beyond
the world? Is it because you are the very definition of There?
