by Brett Rutherford
New to the City, I am struck
by the beauty of young Jewish men.
Red-haired Princes of the City
they seem to me.
They know everything about everything.
The one I am most enamored of
I see at the opera in standing room,
at the cheap seats in Carnegie Hall,
in the library at Lincoln Center.
He notices I notice him. We talk.
His Ashkenazi genius is assured.
He knows the words to the operas,
as do I. He knows the difference
between one conductor’s Beethoven
and another’s. He shows me
the right restaurants, and where to shop
amid the delis and stores
of the Lower East Side.
After two dates, I am taken home
to meet Mother. Top of a high-rise
not far from Grand Army Plaza,
windows with a view to die for.
Mother regards my clothes with pity,
sparks up as we talk about poets
and Russian music. “Oh, well,”
she sighs, “I see why my son likes you.”
As she prepares dinner, he confides,
“Mother so disapproves of me.
We had painters in last month
and she warned them, said right
in front of me, ‘Pay him no mind.
You are not to speak to my son.
He is a homosexual and is not well.’ "
Then, whispered, “Of course I had sex
with all of them before a week had passed.”
I am introduced to matzos
and a chicken broth that was not
to be forgotten. The dinner was peppered
with questions about my family.
Each answer I gave was worse
than its predecessor, until I felt
I was the merest mongrel. I doubted
that dessert would come at all
as my family tree was no more than a shrub.
What business had such a prince
with a poet whose glasses
were taped together, whose clothes
were more clown than scholar?
He vanished after that. I called,
but he evaded me. Finally,
outside the opera, he said,
“Look, there’s something
I need to tell you. I’m not
any good as a friend to anyone.
You don’t want to know me.
I was sent away to an asylum.
My mother had me committed.
It was all I could do
to talk my way out of that place.”
I assured him I did not care.
There was nothing wrong with him,
and a great deal wrong with his mother.
“I can’t see anyone,” he answered,
head drooped as he walked away.
“No one should want to know me.”
Months later, a man comes up to me
as I lean on the rail in standing room.
“I know you liked Michael,” he begins.
My head turns enough to see
this is no one I know. “I saw you
together, and more than once.
You’ll want to know he killed himself
about three weeks ago.”
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