Locations and Implications
David Matias spent significant time in Kerrville and San Antonio, Texas, Provincetown, Massachusetts and New York City, New York and each of these locations represented a different moment in his life as well as a different cultural context of the AIDS crisis in the United States. “Locations and Implications” tracks David Matias’s location through incidental notes written or referenced alongside his poetry. Each of the artifacts in this selection potentially places him in one of those three locations while offering insight to his emotional state through his poetry. The poems themselves are concerned with hope and helplessness, two of them presumably in the wake of his own AIDS diagnosis, as well as the death of a friend named Howard, who suffered the same ailment.
David Matias scribbled this short poem on an invitation to an outdoor gathering. The gathering was held at Olmos Basin in San Antonio, Texas during the summer of 1984, a few years before Matias's AIDS diagnosis.
Written on scratch paper, this poem by David Matias includes the address for Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, New York. The address mentions the NBC show Late Night with David Letterman, but the poem and the inscription appear to be unrelated.
A brief poem that Matias wrote on an index card in memory of his late friend Howard, who died of AIDS in the early 1990s. Matias makes reference to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he moved in 1988.