Drink Now
The oncologist says my friend Paul
will need a total gastrectomy “if he’s lucky”—
Paul the most kind of us, Paul the most eloquent
lover of food and drink I’ve ever known,
who taught me about Barolo and Barbaresco,
about Burgundian Pinot and the sunbaked clay soil
of the Côte-Rôtie—and who will die now at forty
or else survive as never again the same Paul
once the endoscope has snaked down his throat,
once the surgeons have cut out his stomach
and sectioned his esophagus, and sutured it back
to whatever is left of the small intestine—I’m sorry,
if you’re still reading this, but there’s no happy ending,
no plot twist in which he “fights it” and “beats it”
and “wins”—sorry, whoever you are, in whatever
future you’ve found us, but Paul and I also
once lived: once gossiped and boozed
and so loved the world that we, too, were almost convinced
it might last without end: our eyes shining just like yours,
like delirious kids, when we used to laugh
into the glorious, now and forever,
lost eyes of our beautiful friends.
A Curse
When the last of your friends
not dead begin dying
and every window in the brain’s
dark cathedral
is lit by the flames,
may you read this alone
in some hip coffee shop,
or packed subway car,
or at the deafening bar
of a starred restaurant,
the names of old loves
a faint tremor on your tongue,
drowned by the laughter
of the beautiful young.