I’m posting this here because it doesn’t really belong anywhere else. I’m very in love with the world right now.
“If You’re Worried about the Weather, Then You Picked the Wrong Place to Stay”
You know me well enough, I suppose,
to sense that this is something I want to apologize for,
as if it’s my fault that it’s over.
Thing is: I don’t think I ever told you how beautiful you look
when you’re bowing your head and singing about the Chesapeake,
or arcing your foot to pick out pieces
of a wine glass that I broke,
or swooning into an imaginary microphone
in that thick Cajun drawl,
or drunkingly shifting through a cigar box full
of pictures from various stages of your adolescence,
or sitting cross-legged on my floor
and looking for my Hall and Oates record
while he’s standing in my doorframe topless–
and he’ll forever be topless, because
I’ll forever be trying to show people his tattoo.
It’s so very besides-the-point to think these things,
I know, but I can’t help from wishing that we may forever be
pushing each other into bathroom stalls,
drinking wine and eating steak,
paying our rent with federal loan money,
relying on you for Facebook photos,
texting each other pictures of the bridge that connects our respected boroughs,
sparking up cigars with my lighter at 3 in the morning,
drafting cover letters to jobs in unrelated fields,
looking for pesto spreads in the bottom of dumpers,
wearing tie belts and boat shoes during late-night bike rides,
arguing about politics after Favre took it to overtime in Foxboro,
focusing intensely on verb tense agreement,
double-fisting bottles of wine,
wearing boob dresses to award ceremonies,
mixing grape juice and tequila while the sun rises over your balcony,
trying to remember the names of the pedagogical philosophies we’ve subscribed to,
getting spontaneous tattoos and being mistaken for relatives or lovers,
falling asleep during Joanne Woodward movies,
and watching the printed word bleed out into a puddle of its own mismanagement.
What I can never let go of, though,
is that brief glance I got of your hips swaying
while you were dancing to that Beatles song in my living room,
or of falling asleep in my lap while I traced
those words on your forearm that’ll always remind you of us,
or of how many times you’ve shouted “I love you”
as I ran off that porch of yours with the absolutely perfect view.
And it hurts me because right now,
our dreams seem bigger than the universe,
and the universe is too big for me to believe
that I’ll be there when you finally see these things through;
but what I can do is remember these days,
and I can hope to find you again
in the classified section of Poets and Writers,
or the “featured books” page in SPD’s newsletter,
or through a Google Alert that’ll send me to
the website of a small liberal arts school
near your hometown.
And it’s hard, I know, because the only thing terminal about all this
is that irreversible cancer of worry and negative capability,
and this little world of ours can quite frequently be a thankless mistress,
Thing is I cannot help but hold onto the handful of conversations
we’ve had that felt like revolutions in themselves,
or of the scent and sight of everyone
that I’ve sat at an oblong table with.
So the only thing I can do right now
to prevent this pathetic sense of Catholic guilt from slipping in
is remind you of what David has taught us about
“sacrificing for people in a myriad of petty, unsexy ways”
because at least for today
I’d like to convince myself that isn’t how it ends, but how it starts.
0 Responses to “”