Without luck or the benefit of a map,
I landed lightly on your life,
too late to stake a claim,
but ready to wager everything.

Now
I bet you know
I saved that lonely letter,
where you rue your final goodbye:
I think of you and it feels like fingertips touching, you wrote.
Duty kept you from me, it said.

One improvident time,
after hundreds of times
when you laid your watch on my night table,
I was embarrassed for your wife,
her recent assertion there,
scrawled on yellow construction paper
in red Crayola:
We are happy.
We are in love.

No, that’s us, I thought,
even as you took in the page and spoke:
                            
                            ­             I miss my kids.

The lament became a subtle chant
whose power caught my breath sometimes,
raised my pulse,
unexpectedly displaced me,
as might a tornado in its suddenness,
its devastation.

I’d still travel an awfully long way
to feel your lips graze my throat;
too far for you to go,
looking back,
stumbling on regrets,
carrying the bricks of guilt
that wall you in.