A Distant Planet, AIDS Options

[saore]

A Distant Planet

and there,
Beside the thundering waterfall of his heart,
I rubbed my eyes and thought, “I’m lost.”
............................... Rafael Campo


I said,
it's like lifting a cello
out of its case—
“but what do I know
of love's lonely offices”

I'm positive,
he said...
so I chanted
the sweaty shaman's
painted curse

I'd look
inside his throat
to see his misery,
he'd touch his genitals
and think of sin

[saore]

I found a few of his poems in Poets.org and he immediately became one of my favorite writers. I will try to buy some of his books. This is from his site:

RAFAEL CAMPO was born in 1964 in Dover, New Jersey. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, he currently teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people, and people with HIV infection. He is also on the faculty of the Lesley University Creative Writing MFA program.

He is the author of The Other Man Was Me (Arte Público Press, Houston, 1994), which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told (Duke University Press, Durham, 1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (W.W. Norton, New York, 1997), a collection of essays now available in paperback under the title The Desire to Heal, which also won a Lambda Literary Award, for memoir. His poetry and prose have appeared in many major anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1995 (Scribner, New York, 1995), Things Shaped in Passing: More "Poets for Life" Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, New York, 1996), Currents in the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1994), and Gay Men at the Millennium (Putnam, New York, 1997); and in numerous prominent periodicals, including Boston Review, Commonweal, JAMA, Kenyon Review, The Lancet, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, New England Journal of Medicine, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Paris Review, The Progressive, Salon.com, Slate.com, Threepenny Review, Yale Review, and the Washington Post Book World.

His work has also been featured on the National Endowment for the Arts website and on National Public Radio. With the support of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, he wrote Diva (Duke University Press, 1999), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Lambda Literary Awards for poetry. He is a recipient of the Annual Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Pushcart Prize, and he has served as Visiting Writer at Amherst College, George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana and Fanny Hurst Visiting Poet at Brandeis University.

The title of the poem is my own. I thought of all the years that have passed since the AIDS pandemic and all the progress in medicine that has been made. AZT was worse than the illness, so many of my friends died from AZT poisoning and it was so horrible to watch some of them die, that is just seems like "a distant planet" now. The poem that I quote is titled "lost in the hospital" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241380

This was written for Rogelio, a good friend. He was so young and talented.

Sergio