h.p. roche shyku

was an intimate New York friend
of Marcel's who according to
the novel he wrote in the fifties
I think which was later plucked
from the illiterate continuum
by Truffaut and made filmic
then remade only a few years
ago by Bertulluci (misspelled
of course) a movie you left me
to watch actually during my
last all-out trip to New York
so you could snuggle with Amy
and Hunter not yet snoring
nearby called 'The Dreamers'
about a young trio who tryst
their way into a menage and
echoing all the way back to
Manhattan in the teens and
maybe early twenties when
two French transplants with
Roche being by far the more
prolific in his carnal bagging
tussled a wealth of Amer
ican women in the vicinity
Marcel even once coming home
(an accident, I swear, this,
coming) to a charged herd
of nymphs in repose on his
bony squalid little cot that
nearly everyone was appalled
by when they visited his
studio which was not often
since there was very little
to appear there and in-
frequently as recognizable art
a snowshovel hung renamed
In Advance of A Broken Arm
or a footstool bearing a
wink and kinetic horn whirring
such the unicorn of aesthetics
emerging of course improbably
from itself from force of
belief in what can violate
laws of nature by being
imagined, much like any
story of conquest involving a
skinny but by most accounts
lizard-like lothario with 'smiling
eyes' an ex-lover called them
warbling over an always in-
expressive fall-out of the
face below in what could
only be stoic outgrowth
of everything quietly discounted
beyond control or concern
nothing of which has anything
to do with friendship or Roche
or an expansive or even
visionary use of one's time
but to that since that is
the topic at hand I should speak
of how time clung to him
and elongated itself
an effect due to his solitude's
ability to navigate its own
dimensions without growing
weak that is without being
converted into loneliness
as it is with most people
looking out of the other side
of the Large Glass