I remember you,  the midnight
phone calls you wanted me to
listen to, your day,  your work,
your other life.

The time, like clinking money, falls
into the jar on the mahogany
telephone table.   The same dark
wood grain on which I trace the
date of our first date,  kiss, the
only memory to last unchanged

by time,  by events,  by the wine.

The bottom of the glass where the
cheap red box's liquid left the drain
of midnight conversations is  now
this soggy epistolary testament.  

Don't tell me that you toast to a
frail collapsed container such
as is love unknown to the daylight,
the sidewalks of experience.

You only knew in me a triffle,
a while, of white pages.  
I knew you in the
dark sonnets of poetry.

Then you closed your sentence with
a masculine ending like
a gun shot across the page.  

Caroline Shank