1979

a poem to break from the present

Before the neurons welter and the microglia wither in your brain,

before the hippocampus darkens,

I send you honeysuckle heady with memory of

That hot summer between high school and college

When hormones were like firecrackers in the neighbor’s backyard

Unpredictable and loud and dangerous

I send you snapshots of our bikinied selves

stealing dips into others’ pools, invited by older boys

who lived in apartment complexes

with names like Fox & Hounds and the Brookville,

working at the Sohio gas station or Harold’s Body Shop,

drifting as far from college as we drifted toward it.

I send you reels of magic hour anticipation heading into

The dark sky, where the lightening bugs were punctuation marks

in our body language—our raised eyebrows

and long legs that stood, forever in ballet class, in first position.

A keg of beer, Steely Dan on the stereo, patio lights and tiki lamps burned

while the parents were away and the teens came

from all over town to this house in the pricier suburbs.

Not my house nor yours.

Before amyloid plaques invade that still space

between claustrophobic neurons,

I send you photos of a moment in time.

We wore tank tops, Levi 505s, clogs

We came from the east side of the river,

while those from the west

sported Izod shirts, khaki pants, Sperry Topsider shoes.

As if they were born on yachts.

Their hair flipped and blown like feathers

They were beautiful and gossipy and shared a language, untranslatable,

They glanced over their shoulders,

cast their eyes like fishing lines out into the sea of boys.

Before threads of tau molecules tangle like your unbrushed hair,

before the familiar becomes strange,

I send you a Venn diagram.

It shows where you and I stood,

intersected at the periphery of cliques,

always invited but not quite belonging.

We swarmed like cicadas because life was short

and this was our last summer

As children. Now we stayed up and

Into daybreak, surprised by the sing-song robin,

still drunk on Little Kings and swaying lust,

and lingering songs in our heads

Remember this moment, I said to you then.

When we were all friends, before time spun us around

and the centrifugal force cast us out into the world.

In tight clusters of drama, angst, joy, we circled each other

and the humidity settled into fog.

Now I send you words you uttered once,

maybe subconsciously, maybe just to yourself,

But I heard it, sketched it on neurons, tucked it into a temporal lobe:

It is so fucking great to be alive.