Aidan Forster
Awful Awful
Sleeping in your house in which other boys
might never sleep, cooling into cold dross,
I slept as a precise character in an imprecise
book might sleep: darkly, near abandoning.
Topaz bottle tickling my left nostril,
your poppers rattled me to haintdom,
an awful gyre of crisp suction you filled
as a brusquer man might fill an earthen hole
with the molt of eastern gray squirrels.
Outside, snowier unto a third snow.
You drew, with errant precision, the empire
cloak of the world deeper & heavier around me.
You bought me drinks, mute & sugary
adaptogens. You hewed & hasped a future
in which we splayed, variously nude,
on a different rocky beach each day.
I struggled with the otherness of your life:
dawn-mired, you folded luxurious collars
over the finely haired necks of strangers.
Afternoons, snow, you furled & unfurled
maps for boys close enough in age
to hookjaw-crack me for kissing you, awful.
You bade me, in the medieval sense
in which no other option prevails,
call you Daddy, as if grasping the opaline
root of desire and tugging, waiting
for the awful black patter of loam.
I struggled in this semester of ratios:
what are the odds of a boy deliberately
prevaricating a desire of interest?
What are the odds of a boy developing
a condition that will never reveal itself?
What are the odds of you coaxing me
as a master coaxes the craving lip of a letter
penned by a somewhat lesser master’s lesser scribe?
On what became, later, the final day
of the final day of something, snow, awful,
snow, you played your wedding song on the stereo,
describing the moment at which an image
of you might become an image of you
& your husband, the cyclamen eruption
of his & his factions into decorous praise,
& I felt—awful—the palpability of myself
as something beyond the beyond of your attention.
That song, snow, whose name I can’t remember,
threaded me into a new boyishness: not
the little loving self hunkered between vanished
& vanishing, but the dapple-backed hound it feeds,
morrowly, an insignificant & sparkling apple.
Tell me that what I lost as collateral is also a gift:
two-parts whole milk, one-part flavored syrup,
the third & most terrible portion, snow—
not its falling, but its having fell, & from what
clean bowl of lovely, awful, lovely light?