Billy Burning

1979

Head out the car window I stared,

drunk like a crook animal:

one beer a year and a six pack to grow on.

At midnight I’d be eighteen.

Billy at the wheel, you beside him,

me next to you. We’d stolen you,

put a ladder against your gutter,

jimmied your bedroom window.

You swam into the black glass.

He kept a foot over the brake, one on the hump.

Your foot on the gas.

Your right hand in my left.

We drove to the beach, sodden sand races.

When we got back to my house

all three slept in my bed, smell of sicked hair.

Time trails behind me like a tumbling kite.

You broke up with Billy,

I got your letter – I missed it

it was you you were the one it was there.

Your leftover ardor teased me,

but you were still his, perfect

half-moons blue beneath your eyes

lending no light to your love-tight face.

1995

Then the old story, late, too late.

Billy moved away, got a job but too late,

his step-daughter prayed, Let him be strong,

he packed sodas and a clean shirt in his truck.

When his Jesus took a seat,

and He made Billy’s mind jump and jive –

it must have been like your eyelids that night

your heart beat under my lips in Billy’s front seat.

In this silent grown-up future

grown up between us without him,

to burn is to be consumed.

But Billy’s flames lick first before they eat.

Everything I knew and never named,

or tamed, still looks for rest. Billy burned

to death. I burn on without him for you.