The essence of the flame remains even as the candles' forms change

My mother's cousin Billy, William A. Henkin, has died. For the last several years he had been living with cancer; for the last year he was dying with it. I saw him last in the fall of 2012, at an Indian restaurant in Lexington that no longer exists; it was my first real contact with him as an adult and it made me sorry we had not had conversations sooner. He was a therapist and a poet; he was queer, kinky, and poly; he wrote one of the first books about The Rocky Horror Picture Show, from which I learned an assortment of late-seventies callbacks as a child. He lived in the Bay Area and I hoped to visit him with Rob. He was someone I needed no time at all to trust. Inside or outside a family, people like that are rare. They should not be the people who become rarer.

His last collection of poetry was The Causes of Our Loves, a copy of which he sent me in September. This is the first poem I read in it.

The Fourth Planet

The fourth planet from the Sun is Earth.
Or no, the third. The fourth is Mars where
there's little water and the nights are colder than ice.
It seems men couldn't live there in peace or at war.

That's all I know about astronomy.
If you need to know more, lie on your back at night
in an open field, and make up constellations.