Dennis Rhodes
Atonement
—for Cary
When you called me in the middle of the night
I should have said yes instead of no.
I had an important meeting the next day.
I heard the background noise in the bar—
figured you’d find someone, get it off.
It’s the most selfish thing I ever did
turning you away. There was no one in
my bed that night. I heard desperation
in your voice. I couldn’t be bothered. Had
I known what would happen Cary, had I
known you’d be dead of it within a year
I would have understood you did not want
sex. You needed to make love. I would have
met you at the bottom of the stairs with
open arms. O, can you forgive me! I
weep with shame thirty years later. The tears
sting my eyes. Teardrops fall on the paper.
I’d give anything, anything to have
that moment back. My human instincts failed.
What kind of friend was I, what kind of
man? I rolled over, went back to sleep. Damn
it Cary, damn it all. What a shithead
I was. I see now, clearly, I loved you.
I’ve never even visited your grave.
Dennis Rhodes is the author of Spiritus Pizza & Other Poems (Vital Links, 2000) and Entering Dennis (Xlibris, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in BLOOM, Chelsea Station, Lambda Literary Review, The Cape Cod Times, New York Newsday, Fine Gardening, Avocet, Backstreet, Ibbetson Street, bear creek haiku, Aurorean, and Alembic, among others. Rhodes served as literary editor of Body Positive magazine (an important source of information for people living with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 90s) and later as poetry editor of Provincetown Magazine. He co-founded the Provincetown Poetry Festival and ran it from 1999–2001. For a number of years, Rhodes hosted a radio program on WOMR in Provincetown, featuring interviews and poetry readings with a different Provincetown or Cape Cod poet every week.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem is another example of apostrophe—addressing a person who is absent or dead. But we can also write poems addressed to a “you” who is alive, whether a real “you” or an imaginary you. This is called a poem of direct address. Write a poem of direct address in which you talk to the “you” about some aspect of HIV—fear of, risk for, living with, dying of, etc.