Rissem

I was sixteen, a freshman, a former Catholic Buddhist,

a sonnet-writer, no longer overweight but more than ever

ambitious for romance. At night in my lumpy dorm bed

I counted the number of would-be "lovers" I had,

sometimes adding the names of even my mildest fans

to fatten the list.

You were a poet of twenty.

Your forehead was too high, your IQ (you said) one

hundred eighty,

and I called my mother in Queens to tell her about you.

You'd already had mono and worried about potency!

You had loved many brilliant girls in Brooklyn!

But none like me.

We put our initials together-your R.I.S., my S.E.M.-

and signed all our poems rissem.

We collected Tagliavini records for the high C's.

We stole steaks from the IGA, gave your English bicycle

a name I've forgotten, kissed on campus in front of the

statues.

People thought we were disgusting.

But when you came to my archery class

on the windy hillside beyond the dormitories,

you always made bullseyes,

even when the wind was strongest.

One night I cried all night in a narrow rooming-house

bed,

wedged between you and the wall:

I saw the truth: the day would come

when I'd be twenty-eight, you'd be thirty-two,

we'd be married to other lovers, have other names.

And you were going to invent a solar battery!

You were going to discover the truth about aging

and perhaps prevent death!

When you died, fifteen years and three marriages

after we'd said goodbye on the Fifty-ninth Street station,

your best friend told me the driver of your hearse got lost

on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

It was incredible, he said. He would have loved it.

He would have thought it was a great scene!

Sometimes I like to think we are still rissem,

a slender ageless androgyne from another planet.

With bow and arrow we hunt among strange craters.

Breathlessness doesn't bother us, or weightlessness.

The list of our lovers is long but we are indifferent

to all of them. On our planet

we bicycle faster than the speed of light.

In our extragalactic language

there are no words for "love" or "death."