twenty-seven.

Ginsberg, on the back of a photograph, writes
William Burroughs ,
answering the first question; creating the last.
Burroughs by now is
a familiar constant, an image
known even when unknown, a figure of
dreams and nightmares and the violet minutes
between waking and grief, unposed,
on roof of
apartment house East Seventh Street.
His unseen viewer, always the archivist,
the collector of moments,
instants, people, things, places.
He, more than any of them, was the one
left holding the memories, left
with the need to record it all. The one
behind the camera. Scrawled,
where I had a flat,
softening the disjunction, leaving space for
we were lovers those months,
an announcement tasting of requiem,
and then the quiet,
editing his letters into books
not published till decades later,
the broken doubt and we hardly need
(as Queer, 1985)
to clarify, nor the
Lower East Side Fall 1953.
The looming tragedy of this moment,
this impression
is locked in a box in the basement
of a museum in a city far from
its beginnings. Nothing to witness its
hovering here, the ordinary
marking the boundaries of the possible.