slowly, in the rain, wet.
My love, the boy I lived with, lay sleeping, curled up in a ball,
fetal, six feet, blond, muscled, and yet his knees were drawn
up to his chest and his sweet yellow curls fell like a two-year-
old’s over his pale, drawn face, and his skin was nearly translucent, the color of ice spread out over great expanses of earth.
He was dressed in layers of knitted wool, thermal pants and
shirts, sweatshirts: we always wore all we had inside. The quilt
with a wool blanket on top of it had shifted its place and his
knees and face were brought together, his hands lost somewhere between them. I sat watching him, lost, in this room of his. He was on brown sheets. The radiator clanged and
chugged: the noise it made was almost deafening, only in this
room. There were big windows, and a fire escape splayed out
under them going down to the treacherous street. There was a
big desk buried under piles of papers. There were books,
thrown, strewn, left for months open at one place so that the
binding broke and the page itself seemed pressed to death.
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There were books in all stages of being opened and closed
with passages marked and pages bent and papers wedged into
the seams of the binding with hand-scribbled notes, yellowing.
The books were everywhere in great piles and clusters, under
typewriter paper that simply spread like some wild growth in
moist soil, under heaps of dirty clothes, under old newspapers
that were now documents of an older time, under shoes and
socks, under discarded belts, under old undershirts, under long-
forgotten soda bottles not quite empty, under glasses ringed
with wet, under magazines thrown aside in the second before
sleep. Oh, my love could sleep. In the ice, in wind, in rain, in
fire, my love could sleep. I watched him, content, a goldenhaired child, some golden infant, peaceful, at ease in the world of coma and unremembered dreams. It was Christian sleep, we
both agreed, mostly Protestant, impervious to guilt or worry
or pain, Christ had died for him. To my outsider’s eye it was
grace. It soothed, it was succor, it was an adoring visitor, a
faithful friend, it loved and rested him, and he knew no suffering that withstood its gentle solace. I had seen the same capacity for sleep in persons less kind, one was born to it, the
great and deep and easy sleep reserved for those not meant to
remember.
I sat on the other side of the room where he slept, in a
typing chair bought in the cheapest five and dime, slightly built,
perilous, covered in cat hair. His desk was huge, an old, used
table, big enough to hold the confusion, which, regardless,
simply billowed over its edges and onto the floor. The ground
between the typing chair and his heavy, staid double bed was a
false garden of tangle and weeds, or a minefield in the dark,
but he slept with the light on, even he never quite safe because
it was more like sleeping outside than sleeping inside. He would
never be vagabonded: never desolate and out in the cold. But I
would be, someday, putting on all the old trashy clothes, army
surplus, of these cold years, walking forever, simply settling
