There are anxious moments
in the deep hours of the morning
fearful longings
and for what? or for whom?

anyone, a balance, an anchor
the reassuring glint of love
or something like it,
which is sometimes enough

to exist outside my bedroom,
That is what we’re after, no?
Yearning to be alive beyond
our own frail breaths,
to be carried elsewhere in the world
beneath the weight of another

I am weary now with all this longing

~

A friend came up to me
one cold night on a busy corner
namelessly hidden somewhere
in my now adopted city

drunkenly, she began to sway
into vast memories of loss
she said "last night at a party,
someone told me the meaning of life.”

I brought my hands to her narrow shoulders
slowing her rhythmic pendulum of a body

I asked her what it was.

She found herself a pen, and with her hand
took me by the wrist and exposed
the pale skin under my forearm
she wrote silently and then kissed me
on the cheek the way a mother
would kiss her child.

~

There is a girl I think I love.
she is much younger than me,
with the beauty of a girl
who will soon mature into
the kind of full bodied woman I adore.

but for now, she is unfinished,
like a wine that has not yet fermented.
still, there is much to admire
Her questions, her curiosity,
her sensitive doubts and
her delicate weariness;
the way she is not yet sure
of the beauties she possesses

Mostly, she is enigmatic like a quasar:
what I know I don’t really know.

which makes me think that perhaps
I do not love her after all
instead, I feel only the intimations
of a shared intimacy,
feel that perhaps inside us
there is a moment to be shared

This promise of something,
this gift of possible anticipation
is maybe not what I have been searching for
but it is very likely enough.

~

Two March’s ago when the weather
was still cold at night, and smelled
frantically of a morning shower
I talked with an old friend,
who was once nearly my lover,
perched on the apex
of George Washington’s feet

We talked about love and expectation
about loss and how to quell it.
We talked as honestly as I have ever talked.

So what did it feel like,
to open myself bare
and absorb into my being
all of her fear and hurt
so that I no longer ceased to know
anything but her face,
and her calloused hands
bundled against the cold?

It was like hanging on the surface
of a cool and gentle lake,
if only that floating
embodied the breadth of the world’s reach,
and moved us to the very edge of divinity

to be suspended with her
on that March night
is the place I cannot find
with this young girl of mine,
my favored grace

I have decided
one cannot be suspended within
all the beauties of God alone

~

in the absence of love
what is it we miss?
is it the living, pulsing flesh
that we used to share, and touch,
the bodily warmth that would
inoculate us from oblivion?

or do we miss ourselves most of all?
do we miss our life
because it is no longer real
if it has no lasting grace in someone else?