Tell me, O Lord, he did not rot
to Kaposi sarcoma. Tell me

he did not flush that killer,
kickstand-cracking virus

into his paramour, the guy
twice his age conducting a Karmann Ghia

convertible through Harvard
Square, the guy with Sonny Liston hips

and black glasses frames thick
as Malcolm X’s, the guy who flung back

a comradely, “I know,”
when I taunted him, “You’ve got

a live one there!” That was the last
time I saw Jonathan, O Lord, and he

was more of twenty-one, or less.
If he is alive, he’d have sixty

under his svelte belt. He was thin
as a lacquered chopstick then,

tall as a coat stand,
with a rash of acne

cheating on his chin,
his mouth meekly overbit and chippy

with eyeteeth, a cowlick’s tongue
lobbing itself to the left side of his forehead.

Who can forget, Lord, how he roller-
rinked his knees in the Fontbonne Academy

production of The Boyfriend
as if he were speed-squishing grapes

in a steel vat while primping his lips with bunk-bed
insistence through his musical numbers.

Tell me, O Lord of sundials and calendars
with perforated pages, that you have not

yet demagnetized his perky alertness, that
you did not corral his kinfolk

back to the funeral home with armchairs
upholstered in shiny black vinyl

before he was thirty. Wasn’t it enough,
Lord, that you jammed the tailpipe

of his older brother’s car into a snowbank
while he chattered away the Saturday night

cold with his girlfriend and they both
woke up in that heaven where even

the archangels dream in carbon monoxide?
Wasn’t it enough that I loved him in part

because he reminded me of my own
lickspittled mimic of a brother, that madcap

cardpack joker who slapped an unlit
cigarette between his teeth at twenty

and sprinted off a ten-story building roof
in the middle of the Good Friday

recess Boston’s gold-domed State House?