Emil's Room

"i love you from the day you warmed my hands with your breath
because i had lost my gloves"*

1.
i thought that maybe if
i could paint your bedroom window
enough times, that, maybe it would
come down to meet me, the whole room
a kind of great bird descending 
from all the other red tin roofs.
i would walk inside & there
you would forever bed, lounging 
at your desk. no uniform,
just your body.

2.
i could never stand in
the street long because 
i didn't want someone 
to catch me. what are men
like us to do? 

3.
you never did tell me
about your time in 
The Great War but i did
feel it in your body,
so, tell me now that we
are safe below the earth

4.
on nights like this
i still hear mustard gas 
& taste chlorine bombs,
close the coffin door my love,
with me & we will whisper
until all of that is quiet
& it is only the sound
of our voices.

5.
i still wonder if out there,
above the soil, there's still
fighting.

6.
i make up ways that the war
ended as a way of keeping my mind
busy when you sleep.

i imagine millions of men coming
out to fill in the trenches like
the healing of a great scar.

i imagine the grave we're in
is one for other soldiers,
do they notice us?

7.
i still paint your room, only
without brushes. i write poems
to the room where we first 
kissed & were unafraid.

8.
tell me Emil, are you afraid
of anything?

9.
i'm afraid some nights
that they will dig up my body
& put me in a grave separate from yours.
i'm afraid of my father
even though he is long dead
i'm afraid of god & what he plans
to do with us, though he hasn't
damned us yet.

10.
i want to stay here, Emil
& build a replica of your house
underneath the earth.
the yellowish brick, the open window
the smell of the baker 
up the street. i will build
it down here for us.
while you're asleep.


*Emil and Xaver Sumer were
two World War I soldiers who 
were lovers. They were eventually
buried in the same plot. 
They died a year apart after having
served in the war. Friends and 
parents worked to keep them apart
because they disapproved of them  
being "homosexual."