​

VIRGO IN GRAY

 

“Battleship gray,” he defined it,

 

with the precision native to his sign.

 

We went to the harbor to check, and there

 

it was, his color: a battleship, gray 

 

to the tip of the radar tower.

 

 

*

 

The grays multiplied

 

like the moon and memory.

 

Sun cindered, the water shone 

 

oily gray. Pelicans sat on a barge,

 

huddled gray shapes, reflections 

 

 

 

fractured in grayish waves.

 

We stood on the cliffs

 

next to NO TRESPASSING sign

 

on a stairway down to the ocean.

 

No one ever gets arrested, I told him.

 

 

 

He said, “If I went down, 

 

the entire Coast Guard would arrive.”

 

 

 

Gray and immobile as a pigeon,

 

he stayed behind. Alone 

 

I went down the steep wobbly stairs, 

 

then stood on the slippery rocks. 

 

Gray foam hissed around my feet.

 

 

*

 

 

Strange, what drew me to him

 

that night on the campus parking lot, 

 

wind tangling eucalyptus leaves,

 

the windshield streaked with rain.

 

I thought he was more daring,

 

 

 

more ambitious than I, as he spun 

 

his proletarian dreams: an overstuffed 

 

leather armchair, a closet full of suits, 

 

and he, a civil-rights attorney, 

 

at a stunning young age elected 

 

 

 

to the Supreme Court, 

 

writes the decisive opinion 

 

in a great legal case, then commits 

 

a rational suicide, leaving a one-word 

 

suicide note: BECAUSE.

 

 

I said: “You are a child.”

 

 

*

 

 

And yet he dared to dream, 

 

and yes I was in love

 

with a grown-up suicidal child.

 

Rather than study for the bar exam, 

 

he’d watch black-and-white 

 

 

 

war movies on TV, wishing it were him 

 

on the screen, an R.A.F. pilot 

 

soon to be heroically dead.

 

Twilight grew on the trees,

 

leaves turned the color of the trunks.

 

 

 

I came to him at noon,

 

wearing a burgundy fedora.