A Letter from Michael
On the north coast of Germany
the first storms of autumn
sweep in from the North Sea.
It's October now, and the rain
falls on Sylt, where we played
like children in the sandy dunes;
it falls on Föhr and Pellworm,
where sheep the color of slate
graze on the slanted grass-sloped
sea-walls; and the storm rains
down upon St. Michaelisdonn
and St. Peter-Ording, across
the wind-flattened fields
of Schleswig-Holstein, down
the Elbe River, down to Hamburg,
to my apartment in Sankt Pauli,
where raindrops break like glass
upon the window and streak down
the panes in electric haste.Sooner than we had thought
another winter has come.
Gulls fly down-river from
the ocean, they circle above
the chimneys and rooves of Altona,
and the grey wet days now
file through the empty boulevards
and alleys of the city: they kneel
and fall before us, like dreams
of a better life dispersed
by winter winds.Michael, today your letter arrived,
the first you've written in years.
In the last grey light of the
North German afternoon, I sit
at the kitchen table, drinking
coffee and reading of the latest
misadventures: another love-story
gone bad, another suicide-attempt,
and then you moved to San Diego
and lived at a board-and-care
until the chemicals gradually
took hold, and the bad dreams
and depressions finally subsided.Now you're back in San Francisco,
re-born you say, and flourishing
in the awful radiance of a new me:
that you whose history has been
a concert of injury and exile,
a life more damaged than anyone else's
I've known, making the rebirth you
suggest seem strongly doubtful to me.
And I guess this was the year
you got the Aids virus, exchanging
your bungled suicide attempts
for a more socially routinized
form of murder, whose success
at least appears guaranteed.Now in the North German twilight
I remember that winter of 1969,
when I was a San Francisco postman,
and we shared a room in the same
shabby hotel near Polk Street,
and listened to the beating rains,
you the gentle artist and poet,
a reluctant participant in this
bothersome game of life-and-death,
apprearing wraithlike before me,
sitting in your tattered armchair
carefully smoking your cigarette,
with nowhere to go and nothing to do,
looking like one of the Brontë sisters
with your hair tied primly behind you,
fluently blowing circular smoke-rings
into a flat world of darkening shadows
in the rainy winter afternoon.