12:20 IN NEW YORK

A Sunday, in January,

and I’ve come to the West Village,

to visit you, my brother, living in this city.

For twenty years you have walked past

the French Roast coffee shop and the Emma Lazarus house,

to different jobs, different bosses.

You never wrote letters or favored the postcard,

even before these faded.

E-mails, cells, landlines,

none of these facilitate our bond.

You prefer the unobstructed moment.

So, here we are.

Recently, you’ve begun feeding a stray cat on your fire escape—

when you gave the animal a name, the animal became yours.

You called him WAYD, which you told me,

when writing a text, is short for “What are you doing?”

Devotion becomes the most reasonable emotion as we age;

we recognize it in contrast to the losses

and the losses can be defined only with time.

We go uptown, to the Arbus show,

her last photographs, the adults in a state institution

for the mentally handicapped in Vineland, New Jersey—

this was after she divorced, after she stopped believing

in love and started photographing sex clubs.

One of the women in the institution told her:

“I got a boyfriend, he says I’m beautiful.

I told him he hasn’t seen the pretty parts.”

The subjects wore Halloween masks,

the photographs were untitled.

None of the subjects in the rose garden knew who Arbus was;

this anonymity began to broaden her art.

In a letter to her daughter,

she wrote she had finally captured sunlight.

Her letters were typewritten.

Now typewriters are gone.

Arbus hated making appointments, hated calendars.

She liked the idea of a family album

when thinking of her work,

each member part of a larger group, related, tolerated.

On a postcard, she once wrote: “I think all families are creepy.”

Shortly after dinner with her brother,

the poet Howard Nemerov,

she returned to her apartment and slit her wrists.

It was July 1971.

Astronauts floated in the TV.

In Arbus’s darkroom at 29 Charles Street,

her contact sheets materialized from their chemicals.

Around that same time, our mother and father

adopted you, my brother, from an unnamed woman

who gave you away. Somewhere a family album holds her.

What is she doing now?

We took you home and we gave you a name.

Although I know the story well, I do not tell it now.

There are stories that separate me from you;

for that reason, I will not tell them.

We go back to the Village,

down Christopher Street,

past sex shops and Chinese massage parlors.

On Hudson, past Saint Luke in the Fields,

we walk past two gay men with a baby in their arms.

My brother, we have fought

and reconciled as brothers do.

If there are things I regret,

the time for regretting is gone.

Handsome man, you speak of your long-term boyfriend

(fifteen years?) and how the two of you have decided to separate.

We talk of museums you frequent:

the Neue Galerie, the Whitney, the Frick, MoMA.

We do not speak of poetry.

Recently, books have begun to disappear.

My brother, if I name the things disappearing from the world,

how long can I keep them from doing so?

At the Caffe Reggio, I study you,

backlit with afternoon sunlight,

the light intersected by taxis, golden retrievers on leashes,

people walking with yellow rain slickers,

messengers on bicycles with orange stripes,

the masses in the city motivated by a hundred forms of touch.

If I once thought love had limits,

I was wrong.

Then, we check the returns on the train schedule.

I enter the subway at Union Square.

Passengers line up like prints hung in a darkroom.

Teenagers send well-thumbed texts on their phones,

as if romance could fit into such a small dungeon.

Air and more air rushes through the tunnels and turnstiles.

Not long after I left,

you texted from your cell—

your cat had run away.

What do we do in this life when what we love

does not come back?

As the train begins its turn towards New Haven,

Harlem goes by in unerring, random snapshots—

negatives, double exposures,

black on white, white on black,

images captured, lost, focused, then lost again.

The sealed train windows fill up with their industry—

life, life, and more life, all kinds.

I never tire of it.