Can Jesus Save Me

Do you remember the first time you read:

Miracle Ice Cream

Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.

Take what's still given: in a room's rich shadow
a woman's breasts swinging lightly as she bends.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Late, you sit weighing the evening news,
fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,
the rest of your heart.

(Adrienne Rich)

I remember driving in that car, late night, with my oldest friend. He lamented not being able to describe the way the black hills look against the black sky. I loved him for his humanity. It may be the reason we have remained friends through all these long periods of isolation.

A night like this, nearly a hundred years ago, I laid in the dew in the grass and looked up at the gray sky. I knew. I just knew. There was only one person in the world who cared. She is still the only person who cares. I wish for all the world she was still sitting in her secret palace on California Street with our dead dog, my best friends, the two of them.

I laid in the dewy grass again tonight and the world came creeping up against my skin again in so many tiny molecules of wet cloth.

Do you remember the first time you ate a concord grape? I am waiting for the return of romantic poetry. I want to be a romantic flea. I want to watch you make love to a gentleman who feeds you concord grapes. I want to live blushed cheeks and the smell of grass on the soccer field.

Remember Mary Curtain? I catch myself too late at wondering what she is doing today. If she has found love.

There are many things I would like to say to you, but I don't know how.

After all

You are my Wonderwall.