You tell me of the brother
who worked your backhand with his ground stroke

"Come to the net," he shouted
and when you did he'd launch a lob
just out of reach of the moon
and give you that look that said

I am your opponent
you must not trust me

---

Your mother's friends surround
the wheelchair where your stepfather awaits
a slow eternity
that never arrives nor leaves

but hangs in the balancing ether
of able and not
another stroke
unpracticed, unrelenting

---

The woman who bore you
casts herself on the sofa
a reclining ballet
her elegant hands wave like swan necks
in the breeze of her quick laughter
at a joke about her still swollen broken foot

So accustomed to pain
she can walk on fractured bone
the way she still made sandwiches
with bandaged fingers the day after
that lawn mower chewed at her with its arbitrary hunger

---

You trail the hints
of your sexual preference
in small Hansel and Gretel crumbs of lesbian bread

that bar near home where the girls dance
those partners
all lovers
all gender unspecified

How could you know
what I know about me

my apprenticeship by women
in relationship to each other

So after three days of chum-hood
as we sit in the Vampire Cafe
our ears assaulted by
a Brady Bunch Band covering Pearl Jam
without a bass player

your "by the way"
and my easy nod
confirm our friendly boundaries

Just know that while
I already love you and yours
(a moment of elliptical gleaning with open-ended grace)
that my ardor is as strange
as it is different

and when I ask to look at your heart
it need not be from between your legs

but somewhere between
your eyes
and open-armed embrace
of laughter
and learning
and dance

For this poem is really a coupon
to be used in the marvelous grocery store
of the particular moment
of our knowing
each other

that may stretch for days
weeks, months or years

because in the end
just as with the beginning
there is no expiration date

stamped on the carton
holding the milk
of our together

which we will drink
to become wholesome
and grow
in more than twelve ways