Philadelphia, 1988
Boys strut past on the boulevard
each leashed to dogs with necks
thick as trees. The boys all
unwashed hair and torn
sneakers, the dogs lean
wiry machines, thinking
only of their hunger.
I am waiting for you
to come out and tell me
we have ended, that there
will be no more letters
for me to read and re-read
so often that the words blur
staining from my fingertips
straight through to my heart
This is the summer of our discontent.
You will shortly tell me
to go the hell home, and I will
scream that I loved you,
past tense implied as soon
as the words hit the air.
There will be no more road trips,
no more porch practice for the band,
no more pay phones in the rain
making calls with change saved
from a week's allowance ill-spent.
You soon will explain
what drove you in the middle
of one anonymous night
fueled by love and whiskey
to come to rest, neatly stopped
in your quest by telephone
poles that swerved in your way
and the officer who made
you expel the last gasp
of our relationship into
a Breathalyzer while I slept
less than a mile
away, not knowing that you'd
attempted the trip.
I know we will each grow up, separately.
And twenty years from then,
you will speak of me no longer but
I will talk of you still, in screenplays
and poetry. That's the price you pay
loving a writer, once, even foolishly
in youth. You become the disconsolate
ghost that haunts her stanzas, the story
that the lines always fail to convey.
each leashed to dogs with necks
thick as trees. The boys all
unwashed hair and torn
sneakers, the dogs lean
wiry machines, thinking
only of their hunger.
I am waiting for you
to come out and tell me
we have ended, that there
will be no more letters
for me to read and re-read
so often that the words blur
staining from my fingertips
straight through to my heart
This is the summer of our discontent.
You will shortly tell me
to go the hell home, and I will
scream that I loved you,
past tense implied as soon
as the words hit the air.
There will be no more road trips,
no more porch practice for the band,
no more pay phones in the rain
making calls with change saved
from a week's allowance ill-spent.
You soon will explain
what drove you in the middle
of one anonymous night
fueled by love and whiskey
to come to rest, neatly stopped
in your quest by telephone
poles that swerved in your way
and the officer who made
you expel the last gasp
of our relationship into
a Breathalyzer while I slept
less than a mile
away, not knowing that you'd
attempted the trip.
I know we will each grow up, separately.
And twenty years from then,
you will speak of me no longer but
I will talk of you still, in screenplays
and poetry. That's the price you pay
loving a writer, once, even foolishly
in youth. You become the disconsolate
ghost that haunts her stanzas, the story
that the lines always fail to convey.