The moment for this poem passed long ago
as the sly smile of James
Baldwin browns the cover of his words
in the interview where he questions
is there a gay community, and if
he was ever a member, while a woman
shimmies in a red dress in my
memory of a dance floor
and I hear miles and Miles
and a marathon of Bessie
in the thought I am neither
black nor white nor
any other but I have loved
this brown face as perhaps
no other man, though I will
never be of his and he of mine,
though we keep each other,
don’t we, in these lines. O
Giovanni’s room, that love
you deny is your own soul’s
tiny tiny space in the universe
expanding unwillingly infinitely
out to the reaches of a darkness
that neither defines nor limits
us though its notes are inherent
in the whispers we whisper
to the lover who is beside us
and the one who got away
and the one we denied
and the one who is us
but not I. Not I. Jimmy’s
blues, Bessie’s pride, Miles
alive in his horn of plenty
of nothing, and me with my
smile at the way words
betray me, even as I sing
as if I had a heart pumping
with the cosmos spinning
in blue-black space. No
body knows my name, ho.
Mine is no more said James.
Jesus wept for us, didn’t he,
so I’ll not weep here for spite.