Just Kids

A note to the reader

ON MARCH 8, 1989, ROBERT AND I HAD OUR LAST CONVERSATION. The last, that is, in the human form. He knew he was dying and yet there was still a note of hope, a singular and obdurate thread, woven in the timber of his voice. I asked him what he wanted me to do for him and he said take care of my flowers. He asked me to write an introduction to his flower book. They are color flowers and I know you prefer the black and white ones so perhaps you won't like them. I will like them I said and I will do it. I told him that I would continue our work, our collaboration, for as long as I lived. Will you write our story? Do you want me to? You have to he said no one but you can write it. I will do it, I promised, though I knew it would be a vow difficult to keep. I love you Patti. I love you Robert. And he was wheeled away for tests and I never heard him speak again. Save for his breath, which seemed to fill his hospital room as he lay dying.

I wrote the poem for his memorial card as I had done for Sam Wagstaff. On the twenty-second of May, Fred and I attended the service at the Whitney Museum. Fred wore a suit of indigo gabardine with a burgundy tie. I wore my Easter dress of black silk velvet with a white lace collar. There were two grand vases with white lilies flanking the podium. His flowers hung on the walls. As I sang his memorial song I held the image of him from two decades before, smoking a cigarette outside the museum, waiting for me to emerge. Robert’s entire family was present. His father, Harry, greeted me with warmth and compassion. His mother, Joan, was in a wheelchair fitted with a small oxygen tank. When I knelt to kiss her goodbye she pressed my hand. You’re a writer, she whispered with some effort. Write me a line. I imagined she meant a letter, but Joan passed away three days later and was buried at Our Lady of the Snows.

I wrote the piece for Flowers and honored Joan’s request. I wrote The Coral Sea and made drawings in remembrance of him but our story was obliged to wait until I could find the right voice. There are many stories I could yet write about Robert, about us. But this is the story I have told. It is the one he wished me to tell and I have kept my promise. We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you.

May 22, 2010

MEMORIAL SONG

Little emerald bird
Wants to fly away
If I cup my hand
Could I make him stay

Little emerald soul
Little emerald eye
Little emerald soul
Must you say good-bye

All the things
That we pursue
All that we dream
Are composed
As nature knew
In a feather green

Little emerald bird
As you light afar
It is true I heard
God is where you are
Little emerald soul
Little emerald eye
Little emerald bird
We must say good-bye

* * *

A flower that grew from years of flowers.
Shot by one who caused a modern shudder.
And was favored by his mother.

A wall of flowers concealing all the tears of a relatively
young man with nothing but glory in his grasp.
And what he would be grasping is the hand of God
drawing him into another garden.

–from Flowers, 1989

^{Memorial card}

MEMORIAL POEM

As there is strength
in blackness
a deep control
a calla flare
trumpets
grace corporeal
there is a steady hand
adjusting child lace
and bravery’s face
in veil inviolate