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LYN LIFSHIN Once in a New Mexico Airport with too many hours and not a good book I went over the men who touched me, literally, not the ones I might have longed for, passed like any stranger on a train. I remember the names the numbers. Some were still in my address book. One, an English professor has eluded me though I remember his long fingers cutting steak. if he'd mattered more it might have mattered that I didn't remember. Sometimes it was the scent, part skin, part cigarette. Another poet, the second one and the first, how I couldn't forget with a crypt of letters and poems he wrote to me, his stories of yelling poems from roofs of houses he broke into. Sometimes I can hear the way he said Albany with a California accent, feel his body in mine, the first time I felt what I wondered if I'd been feeling. The third knew Kerouac but I only remember his first name. In some note book, maybe in my archives, a list. Some I remember for flowers left in a blue Persian jar, for the horse chestnut he yelped over trying to find my cat. I try to think of the hardest belly, am surprised, it's one so near in time he still blocks the light. As for the ones with something missing, what is gone, a leg, an eye, an ear, what's gone makes them more memorable, unique as it without sight, their fingers could tell everything, like Ray Charles and his women in Ray. I remember the positions, the dining room table but not who pinned me down on the burled fruitwood. The ones who left in the night, insomniacs, lovers, the ones who couldn't take more intimacy than a fuck, chirped, "it's not you, it's me" as if that would make a difference. Then I think of the ones who said, what I did I did better than anyone, how one still remembers my skin, my cougar things. How another said "California" differently than anyone had before or how, afterward, the lines on his face vanished as some of the faces have, hope that will be enough
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