cold chocolate pudding in cut-crystal parfait glasses
when my mother and I were burning ticks off
our dog with matches, on a sweltering day in Miami,
to be there to meet me.

I would want to see Dale Swatkins again,
who was ahead of me alphabetically in homeroom
throughout junior high and high school, and to meet
him again, just as we happened to,

on Chapel Street in New Haven, when he stopped
to thank me for being the only person who was
kind to him in school, but, as he added,
that they also hated me, too, tears streaming down

his face, as he informed me that
he had a good job, that he found a woman who
loved him, that he was happily married,
that he made it despite them.

I would want to have Richard C. Raymond
meet me in the afterlife when I pass, a man who
had presidential aspirations, who was proud to be
friends with Alger Hiss, who was what I had
wanted my father to be to me, who passed
in his sleep, after a lifetime of protest marches
and having been in charge of liberating
the concentration camps in Germany in WWII,

who assuaged me even in his death, when he
visited me in a dream, just to let me know
that he, as Whitman, only stopped somewhere
waiting for me, and if he missed me someplace,

I’d find him in another.
I would want to have Ken Angus greet me
upon my death, and for the balm between us
not to have been occluded by the linear time

that separated us, that we still would have those
summer nights, with the breeze rushing through
the street-side maples and oaks, while we talked
about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, how

despite our travail, illumination could be found
in our very own backyards. Of all of my lovers,
I would want the one whose lovemaking
only made her more virginal to meet me upon

my passing, the one who knew each
of the 64 hexagrams in the I Ching by heart,
who would serenade me on her recorder,
like a gopi, luring her cowherd home,

as dusk turned into evening, who made
my nights inexplicably sweeter, and all
of my mornings with her invariably brighter.
When I pass from this life,

I would like to see Mrs. Alberta Robertson,
affectionately known as Mrs. R., whom I would
visit long after we both left as managers
of Johnson’s Secondhand Bookstore,

she for many years before me, and me for just
a few years after, who vowed to have
a complete set of Samuel Pepys within reach
on her bookshelf, and who declared, watch out

what you wish for, who was more articulate
at 88 than most 40-year-olds, who was a dear friend
and my surrogate grandmother, who could have
plotted stars as she would guide the lost child in me.