In October of last year the neighbors’ six-year-old daughter drowned
in their backyard pool, while her parents stood a few feet away
flipping steaks on the grill. Once I saw a homeless man on the street
with red hair and thin wrists, so I took him to McDonald’s
for a cheeseburger and some fries, where he promptly asked
to borrow a pen and scrawled out his former suicide note
on a greasy napkin, the one he’d written last year
when things were so bad that he even got evicted from his car.
Even the moon doesn’t want to look at me anymore.
I made love to him under the bridge in Central Park
where he slept four nights a week, his mouth on my neck,
hands all over my body like I was a foreign language
he was trying to translate without an interpreter.
And when I felt his hands shaking under the weight
of all that sorrow, the sadness turning his thighs blue,
I thought of Virginia Woolf’s heavy pockets
as she walked into that river, of moths burning
themselves to death in the flame of a candle,
of the way everything can be so fleeting, so transient,
there one moment and gone the next,
like the tiny, adolescent body of a six-year-old girl
skimming over the surface of water like driftwood,
floating facedown in her parents’ backyard pool.
