Heaven must be like this

Memory surfaces like a swimmer

Coming up for a breath in a calm lake.

I cannot reach him, but I remember:

Cicadas sawing through the heat, the ache

Of a voice on the radio. “Heaven

Must be like this,” he sang, and I believed

In that paradise, summer without end,

World where everything lost can be retrieved

By the boy who dives and returns again.

The scene plays in my mind like the chorus

Of a song I have never forgotten.

We believed heaven existed for us

And us alone, two boys learning to swim

Next to each other, limb tangled in limb.