Meeting for a Drink

 

                       

Sitting quietly across from you, listening

 

I look into your face to try to get at the center of

your thoughts, that is, to pull up the root of your words—

 

backhanded, heard before— words you're using

again but now, I fear, have changed over time

 

over space—words that have grown some new

significance, I'm sure, after all your devoted loves

 

I'm left shakily exposed to the distinction between

what is said & what is meant, what is known

 

& what is guessed— your face, your words—& how

both will change over time over space

 

according to which I'm here to hear you out.

 

 

 

                       

Because you say you left home to find

a safer life, by which you mean safer love

 

past family, past intimacy, past devotion

the inability of which you too-soon find

 

is locked in fleeting time and dreams escaping

I am not lost or ungrateful, but silent still

 

because I was raised to treat love as air

the way air is a substance of this world

 

and in the things in it, with density and room

to change, to link together, to be joined over time

 

over space.  But the profligate are blameless now

Those who conflate sex and love the way

 

dumber animals mistake heat for light

have moved freely back to some primal zone

 

 

where if I'm felt to be contradictory to the

surroundings it's because I wanted that and

 

could you possibly understand that?  And

could you maybe untangle devotion from desire?

 

You tell me there's no light in shadows as if

the sole purpose of light is stimulating beauty

 

As if it's impossible to separate seeing from

wanting to be seen.  As a child

 

I looked up at night like a flashlight beam

pointed to the sky and my vision revealed those

 

archipelagos of light traveling over time over space

as each star had a life of its own, fooling infinity

 

in a way that reminds me, now, of the little islands

I discover in you.  Now with my face in my hands

 

                                   

 

 

 I'm laughing because you told me, “Look down

 your shirt and spell ‘attic'.”  Looking down the table

 

between us reminds me I've yet to take a drink of my

beer and the foamy head has decreased to a thin

 

white film, which is, I guess, much like the day when

our years together will become a memory, dissipating

 

like the day when we'll have saturated each

other's lives as much as possible because words

 

once spoken and features once touched will, I know,

become insignificant, fleeting memories that

 

turn themselves over time, over space into bland

static, at which point we both will stand resolved.