RENDEZ-VOUS AT 600 E HARRISON AVE (FISCHER HALL)

For J

There was love in the air, 

or love’s lasting impression from that couple before us. 

I caught a glance of you:

at first, I noticed only your smile,

big, too big for anyone else’s face really,

your grin stretched from Seoul to Jersey—

I thought: I could get used to that smile, 

white like ivory and soft as silk. 

I was taught like many a nigga from Chicago’s west-side

to be smooth, give a slight nod, 

put a lil bass in my voice,

then I said my name disinterestedly. 

What happens next? 

The memories blur together

I know—at some point I did love you—

I would hold your smile, 

your laughter, like I held my first fifth of D’ussé. 

I would say your name softly, whisper I love you,

call you my shawty, my girl-blooming-from-a-star,

and why does memory fade? 

Three years is a breath for a star,

a second of a second—

it’s been that long since your smile left me—

memory flees when I utter your name. 

Why can I only remember the silhouette

of the air caressing your smile?

That sweet voice of yours is lost to time, 

left to grieve it's own forgottenness—

I have pushed memory toward emptiness: 

you are to sustain the void,

I will place you where hatred lives

and disdain dances like a nigga drunk off gnac.

Then, memory returns in swarms—

does it dance as a mockery of my inability to forget?

I see you leaving for a plane, 

your ivory smile covered, you will return to Seoul. 

Then memory returns to me dancing—

we are filled with Dionysus’s drunkness, 

we collapse into silence, your scorn hardened, 

a luminescent shell engulfs that mouth of silk. 

Does memory get it right? 

The contours of your cheeks, your slight overbite? 

It has been so long since I ventured toward the void, 

but tonight I shall return, I have sustained it long enough—

is it not you that I miss, but the memory of a memory?