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.