THERE WAS THIS GIRL

in high school
I lusted for.
It was not desire,
but need. But she
was tangled up
with a moron.
You can argue
against anything
except stupidity.

That next summer
things had changed:
her mom was fucking
a Communist neighbor
and she had abandoned Russian
for an Art major in college;
she knew what lies were
and how to create some
of her own; and I got smart
in the cosmology of drugs
and bullshit. She'd also quit
the moron and watched
how her body leaned in
to itself. Her eyes
were still cat's green.

We read Ramparts
& Ginsberg, sung Dylan
& Motown, smoked pot
& fucked whenever
& wherever we could
& survived some of the onslaught.
But not all of it;
she's dead forty-five years now
& I'm still going--not as strong
but still going. Our pain,
inviolate & absolute, created
a union having little to do
with love as we imagined love
to be, but each time I think of her
it's different--and that's
a real poem.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016