The last time I saw David Hockney
we were in the postage stamp-sized elevator
to the fourth floor at ABC Carpet & Home. 
I was probably fifty—he sixty. Surprisingly,
he was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt.

I felt like a small girl with an eager face,
too beet-maroon to address him directly.
“What are you shopping for?” I could have 
asked—or made banal chit-chat. Instead, 
I stared at the dirty wooden floor smudged 
with remnants of black paint and New York dirt.

Our lives before and since have run 
a parallel course. We had met once before
in the gift shop at the MET. I remember—
I was wearing a princess-style teal blue bouclé
coat with gold spherical buttons. He—unmistakable
in a three-piece lime green suit, his dress shirt pink.

His pale blue eyes peered through circular, 
rose-colored, rimless spectacles—at but not really 
at me. Cringingly, I mentioned I was in my
sophomore year of art school. At this point 
we were both etchers. I remarked on his series, 
A Rake’s Progress—his self-portrait in profile—
the crisp rendering of the Washington obelisk
underscored by a black aquatint rectangle.

At this point we both loved men, preferably naked,
swimming pools, the colors red and aqua.
Our mutual interests blossomed over the years—
the way we acquired a love of dachshunds, drawing
colored pencil portraits, collaging bits of landscapes, 
and hobnobbing with strangers. Wherever he led 
I would willingly follow from afar. 

This year there is a David Hockney retrospective
in Portland. Now that he’s dead, it will be mobbed.
Nevertheless, I will go to study his Egyptian influence, 
the way his parents looked so tolerant and British,
a male bottom being slowly submerged into 
a tepid L.A. pool, the reflective qualities of water,
and how to scrub a lover’s back while wearing 
an apron to cover one’s genitals.