Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Crowned

for Hannah Miller

The routine social maintenance of our domain—
another drunken night at McGlinchey’s, eyes & ears
to the ground as usual, broken then only by your
arrival. It must’ve been Nick who met you first,
I don’t remember, but I saw you were fixated on
him. Hannah: novelist, politico, of course, but looks which
teetered ambiguously into divisiveness for those
who knew you— heavy brows, wavy hair, tall, a bit
tomboyish, also, but articulate, a charmer, & yet I
registered the sense that if I ever got you, it would
be something gratuitous, a surprise, because closed
seemed to be the fortress, & choosing Nick seemed
to betray a masochistic streak. That night, his front
swelled visibly with your arrival— I stepped back.

You were, must’ve been, I later realized, underwater
somehow, surveying currents, examining the wildlife,
surreptitiously & invisibly carving a watery path to me.
I had only what the male of the species always has—
the equipment to complete your circuitry, potent or
impotent in any time or context, waiting latent to
take our moment, make it crescendo through the reef,
weed, rock, as though destined, written into ocean’s
records an eternity ago, when all life dwelt in the ocean,
all encounters occurred in resplendent semi-darkness.
And all this still sitting with the gang at the Glinch,
holding your own with a bunch of macho punks, who
were taking something in Philadelphia by force, me
selected silently, the tomboy an Ocean Queen, crowned—