Graceland

In the garage are Cadillacs, a golf cart. In the yard:
        horses. Here it comes: another poem

                about you, another poem where you are dying,

where being with me was a kind of dying for you.
        So much younger than you, so much you gasped

                when I turned my body to the dresser, to your wife's

picture, when she was my age, when she was younger
        than my age, and wore a white dress, and her hair

                was the color of her hair, and her smile said nothing

like: I know what's coming. I don't know
        if I can stop it. It is not the same. I am making it

                the same. I heard when Lisa Marie at nine found him

dead or dying, naked, marble skin in the bathroom,
        blood leadening, forehead taking on the tub mantle,

                she got in her golf cart and circled Graceland again

and again until the cops came. It was early morning.
        It is only a story but I think it is true. I think

                the worst thing I could have done is love you. No-

believe you when you said you loved, when you said:
        baby, baby. Your fingers that traced my collarbone

                were torn. I think of you there as if you were there,

on the bathroom floor, cold growing colder, growing
        into a museum, a chapel, a conference, a stamp, a black

                you, a Latino you, a lesbian you, a Jew you. What is it

about you that I've made you into Elvis in my poem?
        I have a heart that insists on you living, that insists

                on you young and clean and whole with black hair

and a pressed shirt, and also you old and fat and drugged
        out and hoping. And me in the darkness. It is me

                in the darkness, and I killed you because I didn't

call anyone. I loved you; I didn't tell anyone. I got
        in my cart and drove until you were still, until you

                were found, until you were gone from my arms,

and the arms of this world, the way you had always,
        already been, the way you have always wanted.