I would tell
the six-year-old me
that that girl is my best friend still
in fifteen years
so I'd hold my tongue
when that collage is ugly
and I could say now
we never stopped loving in all that time

I woke up on Tuesday and I was older by the calendar and the law and I said “hey that’s grand”. When I woke up on Tuesday I was also older by the symbolism and I sat wide-eyed between suitjackets on the 7:45, coffee half-down and a brand new watch on the left-wrist. I made spreadsheets. I shook hands. I was The City when I took my first swallow on the rooftop. I couldn’t see the Empire through the cold-May-fog but I could see it in the mirror and on his knuckles and in his eyes. When I woke up on Wednesday I made more spreadsheets. I made more coffee. Then I was home early and Connecticut again. But Friday was the best ******* day. The sun beat me to good-morning and my favorite gone friend ate a gyro with me and another chugalugged to 42nd street on the bright red leather across the aisle. My favorite hand to touch was there for the second drink too, and I loved my job because I admitted that I hated it, and that’s okay. And he was there again on the cusp of days, and he’s there now still between my ears, and Friday melted to the next good-morning and I’m here now, city-drunk and sky-drunk and *******-I’m-so-lucky- and wine-drunk, and dizzy on the rooftops I’m imagining are better than the ones I rule, and Sunday’s coming and I will sleep for ages and hey that’s grand.

there are fewer words for this
kiss on the temple
soft knuckles
the first sip

but it's as good as
any repurposed for
less regal things

a popsicle in august
the sweetest ****-you to
midday thirst

the first snow and
realizing
you can play the piano still
after eight stagnant years

it is
wanting to stay
where you
only ever
cherished leaving

everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues,
and this is mine:

love is not blindness and his especially
his love was not blindness
he saw everything:
what was there
what wasn’t

nonetheless he rested at reading-glass distance
everything in hyperfocus and bigger, like he wanted
like a futuristic camera: oversaturated, overbright

love is not blindness—

love is literature, or wine, or a lens flare
his filled my gaps with what he wanted there
he saw more than the camera did

I cannot condemn, nor could I ever, his amber propensity
to imagine me. to beg literature is a dodge
of responsibility of which we are all
most equally
guilty

and the devil is in the details
that stitched up such an
achingly different forever
than the one he saw

love is not blindness—
his wasn’t, and mine wasn’t
—but it is literature: permission to fill the page
permission to distrust, like I did then
like I do still

forgive me my own amber propensity
to feel the paradox
there

the sky over i-95 is violet, the color of the deepest bruise
like the one you actually remember getting, that eclipsed
all the little gray-green ones from
tripping over belgian blocks, and mismeasuring the distance
to the doorframe.
the sky over i-95 cannot hold water very long
and soon it doesn’t.

you look out the new-car window
silent windshield wipers and you remember
the other times it’s rained on your occasion
(with stinging peroxide sometimes, and
sometimes gasoline, when you had a match
in the glovebox,
but mostly water).

you never stopped liking the way the big trees swayed
in the not-quite-hurricane
or the deafening of the drops on the car’s aluminum backbone.
you used to trust they’d never fall, they’d never flood
the crashes you passed rubbernecking were never fatal
traffic would always clear
you’d never be late.

as you watch the oversized leaves support the waterweight today
you think how every bit of that is gone from you now
siphoned slowly and quietly but
unmistakably gone from you now
you think in matter-of-fact sentences because you are a grown-up:
“I do not trust the trees. I do not trust the raindrops.”

quieter you think
“I do not trust the future. I do not trust an empty building.
I do not trust the movie theater. I do not trust the ocean,
or the river. I do not trust water
when I can’t see the bottom.”

you get a little philosophical as you get hungry and the exit numbers get high
“I do not trust the highway. I do not trust me. I do not trust the curtains
to keep me safe when I sleep, and I do not trust waking to bring me morning.”

you think in matter-of-fact sentences because you are a grown-up,
but also because that’s how the thoughts come.
there’s something that you do trust
that’s enough to warm you as this unseasonable may
comes to a close.
you never stopped liking the way the big trees swayed
and you think how they might fall
but they haven’t yet.
you think how it’s kind of okay not to trust them:
you trust something else.

                                                   (pain is lucrative.
                                                   so is smiling.)

                 a female cardinal perches outside the window of
                 the room, just as you arrive to leave again
                 and you think how she's just as pretty as the
                 candy-apple-red male, though she's dark against the tree trunk

and when you’re back to celebrate the years since leaving
you might even trust that tree trunk
and the girlcardinal you have to squint to see

                                                   you might also trust morning, then,
                                                   and night.

meantime, the sky lightens:
sundrops while the rain comes loudly still.

I was searching my pockets for a story to tell my daughter on the night before Thanksgiving when she was looking especially nineteen, shouldering the immeasurable weight of being nineteen, and I couldn’t find one with a good three-act structure, but I started to tell her about the kind of vaguely existential warm knot I always used to get in my stomach when I went home from school for Thanksgiving, and how I couldn’t decide at the time whether it was happy or sad, but now I knew that it was happy for certain, and how when you think about how once things change they are not changing back it can be kinda heavy, but you don’t have to think about it too often, and we had this new recipe for cranberry sauce this year and you don’t even have to get up early to watch the parade.

When I went downstairs at nine the next morning to put the turkey in the oven, she was smiling in front of the TV, sipping a cup of black coffee with her dad.

"heaven's really crowded," peter said to me
over black coffee on Maple Street
while we watched the kings and counselors
in collegiate sweaters
lose all their religion
like we'd lost ours.
it fell like hailstones—

they all flipped their collars up
and their heads down;
we looked cozy in the window
and we laughed like we weren't
freezing too.

"this weather's crazy," he shook his head
and rubbed his hands together for the friction;
"hellfire looks better every day."
we smiled and put our gloves back on
to revel in our endless earthly cold.

quietly we weighed his words
and decided they were heavy;
we lit a cigarette to share,
blew the smoke up at the holy high school dance
and said with youthful vehemence,
"*******."