In the moonlit garden on the shoulder of the road

I pray that your love reaches a kinder time. You 

Bleed out as I unbind the tourniquet keeping him

Harnessed to the meat of your thigh like a pale knife

That had caught you by sleight of wicked hand rather

Than your great Irish love, lucky and sure. It’s infected

And this will hurt greatly. You moan as I pull. And 

Pant while you bleed. He dies in the grass. A sorrowful 

Grecian fantasy of youth more special without life than

He was while holding onto you. Your wife is married to 

A ghost and you are older than her in the hush-hush way

That he was older than you, and you cannot be pressed 

For irony when you have spent lifetimes missing him. 

Nobody is taking you to court. Not for her. Nobody will

Take you to court if you turn back on yourself in time.

I am the love that dare not speak its name. 

I am the love of fearing fathers.

I am the love to which you can return. 

I am the love of Gilgamesh. 

I am the love that won the war in Troy. 

I am the love that you pray abandons you in time. 

I am the love. 

3.  

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas ‘Bosie’ was sixteen years

younger than Oscar Wilde when his (Bosie’s) father 

took Wilde to (his first) trial for sodomy. Presented as 

evidence was a poem Bosie had written and published 

titled Two Loves, which was a long, ode-like euphemism 

for his and Wilde’s love affair. Wilde died of cerebral 

meningitis after leaving prison (tragic) and Bosie died 

of heart failure (poetic?). I always found the trial romantic. 

I probably shouldn’t. This part isn’t meant to be a poem. 

I’m only writing it like one to make it less awful. Return 

key. Spacebar. I mull over Bosie’s poetry with this too-personal

eagle eyed faith like a bible that promises nothing and I 

try to imagine the grey day at Oxford when Wilde and Bosie

met. And as I feverishly dismiss from my mind that Wilde and 

Bosie were both awful people and as I once again find myself

creating romantic disillusions for the incorrigibly off-kiltered

power dynamics of the past, I picture this: two hands 

meet in the darkness, and for a moment, real love existed like

no other had before.