“First in the heart of my blind spot are the Buckhead boys.” –James Dickey

A cassette tape allowed me to listen
again and again to the poet
reading his poems in a soft Georgia drawl
as unlike my lover’s trained voice
as mellow lamplight to flame.

In the poem that most bonded us,
a white Southern boy embarks on a quest
for the friends he grew up with in Buckhead.
If he finds even one, he declares,
his youth will catch fire again.

A nostalgia poem by a middle-aged man
that conjures the day when my lover,
naked after his shower,
declaimed it for me
in our Chicago hotel.

A shining moment for us,
unaware as we were of the shade
that would swallow his light
before he had a chance to look back
from his own middle age.