To Isherwood Dying, By THOM GUNN

Christmas week, 1985

It could be, Christopher, from your

leafed-in house

In Santa Monica where you lie and wait

You hear outside a sound resume

Fitful, anonymous,

Of Berlin 50 years ago

As autumn days got late--

The whistling to their girls from

young men who

Stood in the deep dim street, below

Dingy facades which crumbled like a cliff,

Behind which in a rented room

You listened, wondering if

By chance one might be whistling up for you,

Adding unsentimentally

“It could not possibly be.”

Now it’s a stricter vigil that you hold

And from the canyon’s palms

and crumbled gold

It could be possibly

You hear a single whistle call

Come out

Come out into the cold.

Courting insistent and impersonal.

From “The Man With Night Sweats” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $15; 85 pp.), winner of the 1993 Pen West Award in Poetry.

1992 by Thom Gunn. Reprinted by permission.