Showing posts with label AFTER READING OLD UNREQUITED LOVE POEMS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AFTER READING OLD UNREQUITED LOVE POEMS. Show all posts

3/3/23

AFTER READING OLD UNREQUITED LOVE POEMS - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

If I didn’t think it’d make me appear crazy still,
I’d apologize to you for having been so crazy then.

Reading the poems I had written about “us”
resurrected all that nervous heat, reminded me

of the insistent stutter of my longing,
how I could never just lay it out there for you.

The answer, clearly, would have been
no, thank you. But perhaps that tough line

would have been enough to salvage
all that was good and woolly about us:

your laugh, the golden ring I’d always
stretch a story for; the pair of mittens

we’d split in the cold so we’d each have
a hand to gesture with; how even now,

the paths we took are filled with starry wonder
and all that bright limitless air. I’m sorry

I could never see myself out
of the twitching fever of my heartache,

that I traded everything we had for
something that never ended up being.

But if I could take anything back, it wouldn’t be
the glittering hope I stuck in the amber of your eyes,

or the sweet eager of our conversations.
No, it would be that last stony path

to nothing, when we both gave up without
telling the other. How silence arrived

like a returned valentine on that morning
we finally taught our phones not to ring.