Chet Baker

If glass could sing that would be Chet’s voice
Toward the end that was there always because
Only the end intrigued him.
We were beginning and ending—each shared,
This-is-our-first-serious-relationship mood
Gyrating between passion and penance
So that after newspapers, TV, novels, sex, beer,
Stale pretzels and torrents of psychologizing talk
We lay listening in the dark to that voice
Soft and cold as February in a leafless park,
So sadly alive it seemed to bury time.

When you love the sweetness of ruin,
Of the good going quietly bad and reveling
In torpor’s pain, only the candy of heartache remains.
Like children we sucked on his brittle languor,
Lolled till dawn in that five-flights-up flat,
Waiting for a message we already had received.