— for Willy DeVille, 1950-2009

In 1978, in a dorm room
in Providence, Rhode Island,
on a narrow bed,
in the dark except for
the blue dial light
of a stereo receiver,
a perfect moment
was played out to the sounds
of Mink DeVille’s
“Mixed-Up Shook-Up Girl.”

She wore
(for a moment)
new pale blue lingerie,

and I was the one who was
mixed up, shook up,
so strung out
I didn’t know what to do,
since my only reference points
were the hustled moments in back seats
that had come before this.

Then we moved together —
and oh, how we muddled through,
what a sweet mess we made of the discovery.
It took hours, thank God,
for us to figure it out.

Willy DeVille, I heard today
that you’re
gone.
I’d forgotten you
and your slick suited street heart till now —
how could that have happened?

Thank you, Willy,
for that night,
for how easy you made
the right thing feel,
your simple touch on a sharp-picked triad
showing me how to move when movement
was the only sense I needed,
telling me that all I needed to do
to begin
was to tell her out loud
how much she knotted me up,
and then to forgo pretty speech,
to move, to sway, to fall and rock,
to cradle her,
both of us lost and then found in blue,
the blue dial of the receiver holding
the rest of the night in place for us;

thank you, Willy.

For you I’m picking triads
on a dusty Spanish guitar tonight,
trying to play a song
I haven’t thought of in ages.

Gratitude is due tonight
for the way you turned
a dorm room, a narrow bed,
and a blue light into
some Manhattan romance,

for the way you turned
a girl
and a boy
into sweet ghosts
beginning to haunt the edge of love —
the two of us knowing nothing of it
before that moment
when we heard that song
and we started,
at last,
to learn.

The way I roll
I come hard as a dagger
and leave stains behind.
How I love to cut!  How I love
to see the world divide before me!

I roll (I tell myself)
like a doctor on a boil,
a demolition expert clearing eyesores,
a big man being big.

I roll, roll
like the walls of a tornado up ahead.
Or maybe like I’m chasing it, big man,
big daring man, rolling up on the wind.

The way I roll
I leave mud behind me
on third story balconies,
knee-deep blood washing up on the undercarriage
of cars parked on the unfortunate streets
where I roll.

I tell myself,
man, you gotta do this:
roll huge, massive, correct,
large as a plague, all consuming,
trip-wire bomb maker
waiting to snake in
another exploded enemy…
yes,
I roll that way.
I tell myself that,

it’s the only way to keep from throwing myself
under my own wheels.

I close the book now
thinking of pages unmarked
by words, bearing only fingerprints

to be found by others, brushing
dust over the surface,
trying to recreate what happened here.

It has not ever been enough
to write and read.  It was always
the only way I ever had

to try and make a stand
against the storm inside.
The evidence of the life I led

is not in the words:
you will need to see the blank pages
I fingered while thinking

of what I should have said
versus what I did say.
That’s where the truth sits.

I lied more than I wanted to.
I said the wrong things the right way.
I did as little as I could to survive.

To learn me
learn this: the work
was all a cloud of red.

The blue behind the cloud
was where I lived.  I close the book now
after sunset and sit back

praying that someone will see
the black dust on my oily traces and say:
here, here he was, and he was so much less than we knew.