We couch our insecurities deep in language’s familiar shape.
(it is very soft on the inside, like velvet)

A young woman opens a door to someone else’s house,
and smiles quickly at me. "I figured I’d babysit in
the burbs for the night," she pre-empts any judgment
of mine (pizza men being primary arbiters of judgment)

…in the burbs. What she means, is, isn’t this below us?
How horrified would our adolescent selves be to see this?
I remember a night from some December of our youth,
which has inexplicably abandoned us.

We shared a cigarette in the cold. I don’t think we said much.
But we both thought highly of ourselves then, thought
surely we were bound for busy cosmopolitan lives.
I thought then - and think now - that we could possibly

have fallen in love, if life had gifted us the kind of
fortuitous hollow love needs to blossom (that cigarette
having been it). Presently, she avoids my eyes, which
I also remember, tips me generously (it isn’t her money)

I suppose I’ll see you around, she says.
What she means is, Let’s hope this doesn’t happen again.

~

Later in the evening, a house alight.
Couples, middle aged, all paired.
Exuding something.

Something a beat shy of contentment.
Libations and babies shrieking.
Women laughing in the den,
men smoking cigars on the porch.

In the bathroom, washing their
faces, they think, for less than
a second: what is this yearning?
The one I can’t explicate to my lover.

Then the door is opened
and the whole film starts
again, the sound - life, full bore-
hitting them first, then color.

I am not any part of this evening.
I am here, of course, but it is the
invisible role we all play at times:
stranger moving through,

grazing other lives, guessing
as best we can as to their
decency or happiness. We all do this,
take the measure of others.

A man, whose face I forget,
pays me. I remember the color
scarlet, or at least thinking the word:
scarlet.

I am halfway out the door
when over his shoulder,
he blesses me.
Peace be with you, he says.

It is an afterthought, of course.
A blithe wish of goodwill.
It is also the best we can do.

Peace be with you.
And also with you.