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Beau Jewkes who I remember three things about fell in love (a mormon)
with a girl from summer camp in the desert who he said

made her mark with her conservative clothing on his mind and who
I must have been a close friend of his to have found everything out

had never snuck out of her house at night alone like he did one time
but who lived in a big house with her father and mother and a huge dog

her name was Iota and she was mixed half Shetland half Wheaton
which in good Beau Jewkes humor he wrote a poem about (he never wrote poems

he said to me, but he always had ideas) and the poem was about the way girls with
their dogs lie on the couch in the same silhouette a river makes in the shallows

skips over the water like someone swallowing a cup of milk
because he had ideas about poems and they were often about the way

people told their stories to other people in the vast recollecting unfaltering voices
Beau Jewkes was a Mormon and he called me one night in the middle of the night

on drugs and I asked him why and he told me he had cancer of the testicles
I remember the day he gave them up because I remember my idea

was to write an elegy to his unborn children (the girl he fell in love with
was out of the picture) because by April the testicles were gone and I remember

thinking what he must have dreamed about in the nights after
maybe Jesus crossing the quiet oceans from the red seas of Africa to the Atlantic

coast of America to those red skinned Jews the thirteenth tribe of Israel
when from the blue depths the children of Beau Jewkes were dragged from his womb

one by one like cadavers from a tidal drift or like buttons off a seaman’s swallowed coat.