let's put it to january,
he says, by way of explaining
some unfinished thoughts.
and it has been a month
of unchecked cold,
of isolation, icicles, and heavy, broken
bones.  it's been hard to even lift
a pen, let alone
put it to paper.  

last year, we knew how to talk
to each other.  he wasn't sad yet and i
was still defiant, and our shared glances
were not furtive, but warm.  we knew how
not to talk to each other,
sitting side by side and breathing in
companionship and breathing out the cold.  
i knew how
to be read to, and he knew how
to read, his voice melting
the passages down so i could drink them,
digest them,
and sleep.

lately, though, we're afraid to be alone.  somehow
we are no longer breathing each other in
but are breathing next to each other instead,
hands in our pockets for fear of what they'd otherwise
do.  we are sufferers of curiosity but not quite
longing, and the silence between us now is not intimate
but tense and weighted, a measure
of time and distance crossing axes
at some invisible point.

so we sit across a wobbling table
from one another, helpless in the face
of conversation.  he politely shifts a chair for me
and in the process spills my scotch.  
january, he says again, and shakes his head
and looks down into his half-drunk
dollar beer, avoiding
my half-awake eyes.