Come with the Summer red toes of your open-toed wedgies
lighting your way, or in your mysterious golden snood,
or one of the sarongs you & your wartime cronies

concocted, coping with good times & transferred husbands.
Come in a deep Georgia tan, trailing children & Cape Jessamine
& young officers with golf clubs, or in

your skybluepink evening dress that bared
your heavenly shoulders & reared your breasts
up to where anyone could see them, come

in a haze of squeezed oranges & pecans & long green afternoons
in hired pink salons with little girls adoring you
from a safe distance, where toddydrinking daughters of Dixie

called to set eyes on the Yankee; come in the drawl
of southern evenings, from under the taffeta leaves,
accompany the fireflies, luminate, come back
 
 

Fugue

I would see him again mornings, Sundays,
Walking that way he walked
Even when unafflicted ­ as if in

The act of hoarding himself ­ that
Gouty swollenfooted
Slow drum roll along the path

That took him from his last-months lair
To the place where he was pretty sure
I was going to be waiting for him. This

(me) & the few other things he deigned
To reach out for at the end, he took neat,
On faith, with occasional fine

Irrelevant quotes from Newman, Hopkins; he was
Fond of elegant converts;
He was fond of the robust

Stillconversing ghost
Of his brother; he was going along
Macabrely baseball-capped,

Bermuda shorted,
Unfitted out for any known
Churchly proceeding: it was the slow

Highsocked rock & roll of him on
His way to me instead to say he was utterly
Unable to recall the evening in detail ­

Had it been so
Lamentable? His
Subaqueous

Dignity. The tidal sucking back of
Last night´s uncontemplatable
Faux pas. All of this

I continue to miss, Antonio, rest.
 

Yang

When I die I want only gentlemen to handle me.
I want to smell their hair & Aqua Velva
& feel their fingers one last time

arranging me, draining & powdering. I want to see
a furry face up close again, recycling my mouth,
realigning my arms across my breasts

giving them a last sweet
onceover.
          I’d ask, in view of what’s to come,

to be memorized from stern to stem by an empathetic man,
the kind who used to send
gardenia corsages, wear a cummerbund

to the Prom, & in his Daddy’s car
plunder my virginal tulle
deferentially. Let him shift me

about till I lie there easy, eternally
sure of my allure, more or less,
his boy-eyes my mirrors