I can’t write a love poem.

I’m thinking too much about loss.

 

I’m thinking of the time when you came to my window

I was fifteen, you were Starlight Incarnate

in a borrowed ride, a black Toyota Celica

that you weren’t even driving.

 

I’m thinking about the night you went dancing

but came to my place instead, you called me

from the Bauhaus (your favorite coffeeshop? Mine too!)

after years apart, yet always somehow together.

 

You would never play the song from our wedding

because it made you cry, and I teased you

for being sentimental, and teased you again,

for taking me to see Apocalypse Now on our honeymoon.

 

I’m thinking about my picture of you

holding our baby in your hospital bed

nested in wires like a Geiger nightmare

a man staring down the twin barrels of life and death.

 

I’m thinking about you leaving, always leaving

family night, date night, weekends with the parents and you

constantly inching toward the door, your black bag

and coat permanently under your arm.

 

You got stoned and slept on the couch,

and I went out and stayed out later

as we became quietly unmoored from eachother.

Until, even together, we were somehow always apart.

 

I’m thinking that a love poem is a loss poem.

The seed holds implicit the certain promise

that one cold day the plant will wither,

it’s frail brown stalk will crumble and be done.