I cannot justify my wanting you

still, even to myself, even on days
like this, when I wander, lost in a haze
of past lives.       Was it nineteen o’ two
or in nineteen twenty when we first met
seven years before my grandmother’s birth?
 
Under remote bridges you hesitantly let
me kiss you, a calculated risk worth
chancing among the needles, used condoms
 
but no, that was nineteen ninety two, after
your marriage failed, justification then
for my holding you deep in Creve Couer Park, a secret
folding, intricate, within itself, as between two men,
not as the opening of a pure passion,
but a spiraling inward. An unresolved question.