David Hopson
At the Grave of Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel
I’m searching for Proust,
but the map of the tombs
is useless. Black branches
like capillaries
against the white autumn sky;
stones ruinous and listing,
the older names worn away
by weather. So few make it
on a map: Paris’s Little Sparrow,
the singer from The Doors.
The aeronauts are a surprise.
A pair of Frenchmen, chasing measures
of pressure and altitude, ascending
too high in their gas balloon.
The sky crushed their lungs.
They were buried together.
On their grave: two bearded giants
on a copper bed, their clasped hands
livid with green. More like lovers
than partners in science,
though history is silent on the matter.
Thirty years ago, the year
before I came out, the year before I came
with another man in
the room, I stood on the Capitol Mall.
Thousands and thousands lay
not beneath the ground,
but blanketing it—a quilt for every
body fallen to the plague,
rendered by lovers and friends and those mothers
who did not disown (or perhaps did
and then, too late,
embroidered their amends). In those days,
there were those who believed the dead
should not be buried for fear
they contaminated the ground: AIDS
seeping into the water supply.
I spent the better part of an afternoon looking
for the boy who’d flickered like a ghost
on the nightly news, back when I
was a boy. An infected transfusion.
Barred from school, blamed by neighbors,
dead before I had a license to drive. I passed
a Golden Gate Bridge stitched
in sequins, then, a mile on,
a plane piercing a calico cloud.
One panel read, One of a kind.
One of many. I dragged my rage
down the rows. The fear
I would never find him. The fear I would.
Portrait of Ross in L.A.
After Felix Gonzalez-Torres
When Ross died, his lover swept
a Ross-sized pile of candy against the gallery wall.
A foiled spill tall as a body
slumped in the corner. The weight of it,
to the ounce, Ross’ ideal weight.
Viewers were invited to take a piece,
the bright pile wasting away
before their eyes.
Ross died of AIDS. My friends
were spared. In their prime,
they pretended to die
on the floor of St. Patrick’s,
carted away by the police. I grew,
touched not by illness,
but its shadow. Too frozen,
for many years, to open my mouth
for a man. The gallery replenished the pile
every time it disappeared.
I have never had to do anything as sweet
for the men I love.
David Hopson is a poet and novelist living in Brooklyn, NY.