Downtown anywhere and between the roil
of bathhouse steam—up there the linens of joy
and shame must be laundered again and again,
all night—downtown anywhere
and between the column of feathering steam
unknotting itself thirty feet above the avenue’s
shimmered azaleas of gasoline,
between the steam and the ruin
of the Cinema Paree (marquee advertising
its own milky vacancy, broken showcases sealed,
ticketbooth a hostage wrapped in tape
and black plastic, captive in this zone
of blackfronted bars and bookstores
where there’s nothing to read
but longing’s repetitive texts,
where desire’s unpoliced, or nearly so)
someone’s posted a xeroxed headshot
of Jesus: permed, blonde, blurred at the edges
as though photographed through a greasy lens,
and inked beside him, in marker strokes:
HOMO WILL NOT INHERIT. Repent & be saved.
I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit: the margins
which have always been mine, downtown after hours
when there’s nothing left to buy,
the dreaming shops turned in on themselves,
seamless, intent on the perfection of display,
the bodegas and offices lined up, impenetrable:
edges no one wants, no one’s watching. Though
the borders of this shadow-zone (mirror and dream
of the shattered streets around it) are chartered
by the police, and they are required,
some nights, to redefine them. But not now, at twilight,
permission’s descending hour, early winter darkness
pillared by smoldering plumes. The public city’s
ledgered and locked, but the secret city’s boundless;
from which do these tumbling towers arise?
I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit: steam,
and the blinding symmetry of some towering man,
fifteen minutes of forgetfulness incarnate.
I’ve seen flame flicker around the edges of the body,
pentecostal, evidence of inhabitation.
And I have been possessed of the god myself,
I have been the temporary apparition
salving another, I have been his visitation, I say it
without arrogance, I have been an angel
for minutes at a time, and I have for hours
believed—without judgement, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,
is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s
the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy.
I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit:
stupidity, erasure, exile
inside the chalked lines of the police,
who must resemble what they punish,
the exile you require of me,
you who’s posted this invitation
to a heaven nobody wants.
You who must be patrolled,
who adore constraint, I’ll tell you
what I’ll inherit, not your pallid temple
but a real palace, the anticipated
and actual memory, the moment flooded
by skin and the knowledge of it,
the gesture and its description
—do I need to say it?—
the flesh and the word. And I’ll tell you,
you who can’t wait to abandon your body,
what you want me to, maybe something
like you’ve imagined, a dirty story:
Years ago, in the baths,
a man walked into the steam,
the gorgeous deep indigo of him gleaming,
solid tight flanks, the intricately ridged abdomen—
and after he invited me to his room,
nudging his key toward me,
as if perhaps I spoke another tongue
and required the plainest of gestures,
after we’d been, you understand,
worshipping a while in his church,
he said to me, I’m going to punish your mouth.
I can’t tell you what that did to me.
My shame was redeemed then;
I won’t need to burn in the afterlife.
It wasn’t that he hurt me,
more than that: the spirit’s transactions
are enacted now, here—no one needs
your eternity. This failing city’s
radiant as any we’ll ever know,
paved with oily rainbow, charred gates
jeweled with tags, swoops of letters
over letters, indecipherable as anything
written by desire. I’m not ashamed
to love Babylon’s scrawl. How could I be?
It’s written on my face as much as on
these walls. This city’s inescapable,
gorgeous, and on fire. I have my kingdom.
