We may have been alone together
flying over the coast where we both couldn’t stay.
The gentleman in the novel came into your bed;
one day, without warning, you felt like him too.
Drawing the shades up, by the door with your hair wet.
When we met, you kept me up saying very few things.
As all else, and dressed wisely, we fled our flawed forms.
Are you surprised then that anyone’s staying together? Surprise.
How surprising it turns out to be.
The three of us at twenty or close to the same age.
And no one wore a jacket wherever we went,
like no one wanted love for more than a day.
The boy I buy gin from says you’re next at just the right moment.
I pay him and slip into touching his hands.
In Bastille—on Sunset—late and blurry in Dolores Park.
What does time have to do with us there?
You ask if charm can redeem someone (maybe),
but none of this runs on logic, and it isn’t Voltaire.
At some point they walked in and needed
to throw it away or in someone’s way somewhere.
Take your pick, find your match—
it’s a real marketplace.
Overlooking Second Avenue I said,
this is one life view. “The delay is temporary.”
Over a speaker the sentence repeats like your face.
And I followed you into that temporary;
over the canyons, away from the hills,
far from the ocean and back here.
Toward what felt found and mostly—
it’s morning now, nighttime where
you are—was not, would not be.
Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys (2012). He lives in New York City.
Photo by MoToMo
