Rane Arroyo

Brokeback Mountain

It’s the story of my life: minus
                                    the big budget close-ups, plus a film
director unsure of my fate, minus
                                    a season among sheep, plus mountains
looking like saddles for my true
                                    love to ride, minus extras with tire irons,
minus awards, but the yes of two 
                                    men becoming one, the sí of kissing far
from angels (how Blakean), plus
                                    Mormon underwear stripteases, Sundays
wearing vodka haloes, plus
                                    nights spent on the floor and somehow
not stepped upon by God, plus
                                    exorcisms and cold rivers, whispers in
Spanish from our missions, plus
                                    secret sleepwalking into each other’s
doubts, free to quote Wilde, plus
                                    a plan to escape America, but
it’s the exact story of my life with 
                                    my cowboy, minus the sense of an impending
Patmos, that franchise of whispers and 
                                    wild kisses, minus the script
(we were our best scriptures), we the scarred
                                    ghosts wearing landscape’s honesty, photogenic
Adam’s Apples, designer sorrow, minus
                                    talk show rodeos, paparazzi round-ups,
politically-correct high fives, minus
                                    the nightmares of winged horses with
hooves striking rocks to start fires, plus
                                    slow motion nights on Speed, education
and library cards, the Spanish of my skin, plus
                                    a belief in doom, nights bedding the moon,
two men without spin doctors, plus
                                    an unedited nakedness, joy rides in beds
offering amnesty for the crime of being, 
                                    plus our Tijuana plans for a destiny makeover,
our nights as free verse Rimbauds 
                                    in cowboy boots, plus vaqueros keeping
quiet about the specifics that become 
                                    the story of my life, plus Judgment Day
drinking games: showing God just
                                    Brokeback Mountain to explain myself,
minus the editing, each moment as 
                                    Love’s monument and God’s cameo, in my
image, in my imagination, in my 
                                    nation while I and my cowboy are silent
having to learned to speak wind,
                                    wind from nowhere, wind with news of home,
of our entangled shadows seeking
                                    us with the plus and the minus of having
form, and we ride away from the cosmic 
                                    to the specifics of long nights without stars
with clenched fists, us undressed and
                                    wondering what it feels like to become fiction.