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Unexpected ElegyWhen I wrote him off he was famousin his fashion, a caricature of all the people who had imitated him, whole audiences of them, the screwy drugged-out Angel of Light making only the occasional flight in the theater he created. Afterwards he died of 'gay pneumonia' before so to speak there was such a thing as AIDS, as if he had invented his death, too, and all the others have imitated him. "I heard that Hibiscus was dragged screaming in chains down the middle of Polk Street," said Jilala or Ralif or someone else who would have heard it at the baths, and we all disapproved. I could see it plainly, the nineteen flowing layers of garments, the wreath of real flowers in waist-long hair and the glitter in his beard, writhing in oil and broken glass under the feet of buses and cars and the aunties of Polk Street-- right then I forgot him for ten years, whom only now I remember: he showered us with rose petals, my first lover and I, coming through the velvet curtain between his room and mine, scattering handsful over our bodies as we lay there making love he called me Garance sometimes, and once when the commune was in a crisis too ordinaire for his delicate self he handed me a note and fled the house, I have the paper still: 'Garance -- Never mind. The moment is past.' Baptiste he came from New York longer ago than that (I was a model, he said, my specialty was looking sullen) the beautiful boy who wanted to sleep with me when I was still living alone in a carriage house and had never slept with anyone, and he was still George Harris the Third. 1/2/89 |
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Issue #8, April, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.