Summer Poem, 2012

I guess my new life started on that elevator
going down seven floors in as many seconds

Or at least it felt that way when I kissed her
and for the first time in six months there was
something about me that you didn’t know.

Me and the boys, I’ll admit it
we’ve been sober less often lately

and it’s been an ongoing debate as to
whether that’s just a coincidence of the summer
or if we’ve been fighting something no one’s talking about

Sometimes, at night, when we drink on the porch
I push two fingers through the webby air
trying to determine what it is
and if it carries a pulse.

Which is not to say that
I’ve been terribly unhappy

Home and Office

Today, at the coffee shop that has become my office
(the office has become my home since you stopped
being that) I saw your roommate distraught in heels
and orange dress,
racing in
racing out,
saying  to me
“don’t ask”
the very moment after I asked

before climbing into her car
and driving off.

Once, I met a girl through a friend who put her hand on my leg at the bar underneath the booth we sat in and it both startled me and flattered me. When she offered to drive with me to the next place, I thought of you and wisely declined. You know this already. What you don’t know is that I wanted her, but not in the way people ordinarily want people. Not for sex, nor because I was curious whether her lips kissed differently than the lips of others [although, if I’m being frank, there may have been some of that too (after all, I thought of these things as I sat down to write this so of course I must have wanted it, whether then or now)]. The thing was that she was small. Small, yes, but not (perhaps never, but I didn’t know her long enough to get to know) girlish, and it made me think how awful, how very awful it must be to never get the chance to sit in someone’s lap as an adult and feel beautiful. Never young, never coddled. Kept. Held, but without condescension or paternalistic pretense or even intimacy (at least as it is commonly understood). Instead, a more casual comfort: a place secure but not a hiding place, a time where you can be touched but still ultimately remain yourself.  So, I wanted her but only (or, fine, no not only but yes mostly) for that image I held in my mind of her sitting in my lap at a party under the ceiling fan light in someone’s den. We were so young into things then, do you remember? And though I loved you on that night when her hand fell upon my leg there were certain moments when I felt the cautionary catch in my throat that forecasts an impending mistake. But I did not make that mistake. And it was because I loved you and also (but, God, not mostly) because you and I are the same size. You have decorated my lap in the ceiling fan light of living rooms and on other occasions I have decorated yours. And I use this word with purpose because (how I should have told you before now) I felt beautiful there.

There was a time during the fall of that year when we would sit and smoke marijuana and read poems to one another out loud on the porch. I’ll admit now that I never understood them. The rapidity with which they gestured at meaning, their texture somehow reminding me of those plants which spend their whole lives underwater. They puzzled me. Now, I don’t even remember which ones we read. I wish to promise you, though, that it wasn’t for the warm haze of those evenings or the drugs that my mind wandered so. Rather, it was the way you controlled your breath as you read. In that motion were all the notes and words that ever passed through your throat. I remember that, and for me, from those evenings, that is enough to remember.