In the Meatpacking District

The day like a thousand steps
and me too anticipation-petrified
to note the strain of each or all;

Imagining you beside me at MoMA
in the next room contemplative
before Magritte while I succumb

to Klee's underembellished portrait
and discover Boccioni for the first time;
Wishing you there beside me

to mark with a knowing glance
the humor of a tourist confident to his friend
that The Persistence of Memory

is Dali's most famous painting
(and promising the existence
of a larger version elsewhere).

At dinner you hide in the shrugs
of friends sick of hearing your name
cross my lips like a profane sacrament.

Later, across a table your angular visage --
overbite inhabiting a cloudy smile --
captures candleflame and dances,

a vindication of our mutual apprehension
three years later -- and not a blue day gone by
without a rumor of rain in your name.

To have given what cannot be reclaimed,
a cloak sewn from what is worthy in me
that i'd forgotten lending.

My spectral companion embodied
and in the flicker and din,
a drag queen belting out show tunes

at the next bar
over cabernet
no candle.