ON HEARING FROM MY FIRST LOVE

That entire season in Alaska

even the sun lost its reason

& hung in the sky,

refusing to retire,

as if to eavesdrop on

our young love’s intensity.

                                             Free

on personal recognizance

from the federal penitentiary—

where nights spent guzzling narcotic

cough syrup & tequila with Eric,

my anti-skinhead-skinhead friend from tent city,

had eventually landed me—

I was jumping bail

when she & I parted

those twenty years ago,

when, that is, the Ketchikan-to-Seattle

ferry set sail

& literally parted us,

                                    our lips,

                                                    as we kissed goodbye.

Sweet as her e-mail

the other day was,

replete with j-pegs

of her wholesome husband & their newborn son,

even some highlights of her landscape architect’s

portfolio, right down to her proposal

for how to fill the hole

9/11 left behind,

there was, of course,

no escaping the note’s subtext,

her tacit question.

                             As a poet’s ever got recourse

to metaphor, I’ll submit

that our Pacific Rainforest romance

was just too fragile & exotic,

too site-specific, I guess,

for its transplant to the Lower

48 to ever take root & flower. 

Or, less

highfalutin, if more self-centered & -incriminating,

it might well be

what the voodoo priestess

tried to tell me

one Thanksgiving Day when

out of a drunken fugue I came to

in the Baton Rouge bus station

& found her staring at me:

I don’t know how to handle happiness.