The house cost a dollar in ’76.
That was the lottery fee. You’d lost out
on two or three before this one
turned up: a crumble of bricks
and rotted floors, no front stoop
and holes in the roof
you could climb through.

Here you are with your friends from the block –
dazed lottery winners all: tall
slender beautiful men
dressed in pressed jeans and
the long-collared shirts you wore then,
hair chin-length and smooth,
smiles incandescent, eyes
on one another, gazes we recognize
but could not name.

In a stifled closet, stacks of albums
track your travels: ships to

London, Paris, Singapore; by air
to China, Denmark, Johannesburg;
by trolley from East Berlin to West
when the wall was new and passports
were checked by rifle-bearing men.

You ventured everywhere, coming home
with scarves and bracelets for the sisters
you loved. They swore you hung the moon,
lone son in a house full of daughters.
You left for school and never looked back.

Your house swells with treasures:
painted, carved, cast, sewn,
a thousand stories told
and untold – like the time
the ship’s captain reprimanded you
and your friends for cavorting
with too many members of his crew.
You must have been quite something
in your day.

In dozens of these photos one face
appears, your best friend of the past
sixty years. I think of family holidays
spent apart, weddings and birthdays
unattended, your lovely neighbor boys
dying one by one, and how
you carried on two lives alone:
one you were born to, the other found.

Then one June the black-robed arbiters
ruled that love is love:
by fiat, by decree, by fate,
by all the means love has.
And I wonder what you must think
looking back, of all the people
you have loved who
if they were still here
could have planned new lives now
that yesterday they could not own.