At the urging of a friend, I'm posting a poem I wrote some years ago. I was living in Los Angeles, in the Silver Lake neighborhood, just east of Hollywood. There was a gay and lesbian bookstore called A Different Light at Sunset Junction, where Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevard met at Sanborn Avenue. The building rented for the bookstore was originally intended to house and repair Red Car system trolleys. The space had been minimally upgraded to allow for renting to retail businesses. With an unusual slanting front facade, high ceilings and mock-Tudor appearance, the store appeared to have occupied its space for decades.
Gay and lesbian authors made A Different Light bookstore part of their book signing tours, including Quentin Crisp, Ned Rorem, Armistead Maupin, Christopher Isherwood, David Hockney, Paul Monette, William Burroughs, Edmund White and hundreds of others.
A friend of mine who was a writer told me about a weekly series of readings by local writers that was held at the store on Sunday evenings at 7 o'clock, a kind of literary open mic night.
And one Sunday I went, with a couple of poems I had written. I don't think I had ever shown anyone my writing prior to this. Much of it I had written in New York, where I lived in the mid-70's, and which consisted of love poems to someone I was crazy about but whom, naturally, I could never have. Some of it wasn't bad, and some of it was maudlin and sappy, written while hung over and feeling... well, maudlin and sappy.
But the more I wrote and the more I read and put my work out there, the better I felt about what I was creating. The responses to my work were encouraging, supportive and helpful. The series was even covered in a blurb in the LA Weekly and I was mentioned, along with a couple of others.
After a few years the man who had created the series and curated it, James Carroll Picket, decided that enough good, solid work had been presented that he would select the best of it and put it in a book. A poem of mine, "Lost: Turtle" was chosen along with other poems, stories, short plays and stuff that, frankly, defied classification. Sadly, James died before he could see the book published, and the job was taken over by the man who had told me I should start writing, Rondo Mieczkowski. He saw the project through and the book, Sundays at Seven: Choice Words from a Different Light's Gay Writers Series, was published in 1996.
Not long after I moved back east to Philadelphia, Rondo asked me to read selections from the book at Giovanni's Room, and at the Different Light branch in Manhattan, which I was glad to do. I haven't seen him since, and the various branches of A Different Light all eventually closed.
But I still have two copies of the book. And I've started putting all those poems into Word documents, since they were all written either by hand or on a typewriter. This way they're saved for posterity. If posterity will have them.
Lost:Turtle
Out here where houses are solid and wide
and the trees, celadon and bottle-green
scrub the sky, on a telephone pole a sign:
"Lost: turtle".
Printed in a father's hand,
exasperated father
whose promise of replacements --
puppy, kitten, neon tetra --
meet son's small voice upraised
like a little fist: No! No!
Another will not do, and so,
Lost: turtle.
Forever, I'm afraid,
plodding and unnoticed as an old waiter,
in the shrubs, in the tall grasses
fizzing with insects.
Lost: turtle.
Yet son sleeps soundly, fists unfurled,
as father, empty glass in hand
sits on the dark edge of a bed,
feeling for an instant what the boy feels.
It grips his heart and makes him shiver.
It is hope. And it is in the house.
