May

aybe it's just me. Maybe I'm one of these people who live in the past because the present has nothing to offer. But how is it that a city can hold such a grip on us that we are forever alien, wherever else we go? What miracle can be confined in a city with dirty streets, dirtier politics, rotten water, and cold and unfriendly natives, that I cherish even the heartbreak that I knew there? What would I achieve if I walked again through a little Square in the center of town, sat again on one of its iron benches, and relived a few of the more poetic moments of my life? It wouldn't create a new poem, nor would it subtract one calendar year from the accumulation of calendar years since those days. What if Philip, or Evan, or any of those others, with whom my memories are all tied up, would find me there and sit beside me? What could we possibly be to each other now, except perfect mirrors, reflecting the burden of Time?

Why should I look back with longing upon a one-room studio on Charteris Street that never belonged to me, where sometimes I wasn't welcome, and which I will never see again? Why should Philip, who hates me now, who maybe only tolerated me then, be so alive in my mind that I think of him constantly, ten years past the time I last saw him? Why do I even write this, if not in the ridiculous hope that some time, some way, Philip might read it, and know that as long as I live, he will never die?

The studio on Charteris Street was Philip's, and I don't care where you go, you

will never find it. Because long ago Philip left it, and without him, it does not exist. How can a slew of books, an old upright piano, and walls covered with some good, some bad, paintings, create an atmosphere? Hundreds, there must be thousands of such places. In Greenwich Village, on Camac Street, Philadelphia, and the Latine Quarter, Paris. But none of them have Philip, and Philip's genius creating atmosphere.

How much can one room contain. Not in chairs, tables and beds. But in glamour, enchantment, and dreams. How is it possible, across the span of years, to smell, even to taste again, that steaming mess of chop suey, brought in from the Chinese place across the street; to reel again under the impact of too much tokay or muscatel? To laugh again, recalling Johnnie in the process of an excrutiating imitation of a Wagnerian soprano in action? Or to weep again, as you once wept with Philip, tearing his heart out and yours, because his love was gone?

What would you see, if you saw Philip? A little fellow, with myopic eyes, grizzled curly wires for hair, and the look of Puck about him, ageless and indefinable. You would look at him, and look at me, and think, this is Philip? He would be wearing a plaid shirt, with lots of blue in it, open at the throat. Or maybe held together with some clashing gay-colored tie, altogether wrong with the shirt. From beneath his baggy trousers would peep his everlasting moccasins. His eyebrows would be flying out like wings and his nose swooping like Bob Hope's. His head would seem too large for his body, but his body would amaze you with its unexpected agility and power.

And what would you know if you knew Philip? You would know Methuselah and Peter Pan. You would know Percy Shelley, Omar Khayyam, and Noel Coward. You would know an artist who painted vigorously and often well, a pianist who played enthusiastically, and sometimes badly. And you would know a lover, who loved sorrowfully, foolishly, and eternally.

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