They bounced quarters in the bars of Brittany
and old Spain, and before them Greeks
flung the lees from their cups, accuracy
portending intimacy with whomever
the victor was besotted. But with the object
of your affection, it was the opposite,
the thought of kissing a boy made him sick
until after a few drinks. He aimed
to disavow his self-denial somewhere
between dancing by stumbling and comatose
in the leaves behind the party house.
Even if he puked like he was getting you
out of his system, it was none other
who held his head that night of abandon,
of him prostrated like a baby, like a king
left on a mountain, impotent
against the fate of who he really was.
He was just the kind of pretty delusion
Sophocles wouldn’t have bothered with
even if he did brag about symposia
famous for pitchers not papers. Maybe it’s you
damned to blindness, letting it preside
over a life you know is small change,
refundable, that if that boy ever saw you
naked in his arms, he can’t remember:
if he loved you, he loved you,
then pressed on into the dark.
David Moolten’s last book, Primitive Mood, won the T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). His chapbook The Moirologist won the 2023 Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming. He lives in Philadelphia.