Dancing to Remember

Some afternoons
their rooftop security cameras
recorded him
slow-dancing his nude Tai Chi
to music in the secluded garden
they planted as an outdoor library
Walt Whitman lilacs
Robert Frost birches
Marlene Dietrich linden
Mapplethorpe calla lilies
Faulkner roses for Emily
sleeping with the gay dead.

He moved stretched breathed
to become one with the bodies and spirits
of thousands of nude gay men of every look
one-spirited, two-spirited, trans-spirited,
spirited away, too soon, too soon,
dancing the divine melancholy
of Satie’s Gymnopédies.

He remembered his friends
disappearing from
surging streets
juke-box bars
jam-packed discos
restaurants
with empty chairs and empty tables
twice as many dead from plague
than died in Vietnam
remembered them all
those sexy men,
each and all sexy in their way
who came from everywhere
living it up when
Beautiful People
of all kinds of strange beauty,
even the hot off-beat ones
who looked like Picasso experimented,
cruised the Titanic 1970s
before the iceberg of AIDS.

Beauty was their vocation.
Some of them,
some of his Folsom Street tricks,
like the horse-hung young hippie stallion
in the orgy room at the Barracks bath
whose thick blond braids
he pulled back like reins
came so hot to his memory
they materialized
like glowing outlines
of wire figures
written in thin air
by kids waving
burning sparklers in the dark
like Cocteau’s
luminous lighting paintings
like Beatrice Lillie’s
fairies dancing
at the bottom of their garden.