This is the next title I tried on my editor--
"Because You Aren't Here to Be What I Can't Think Of."
She turned that right down.
They'll never remember that, she said.
"Because you aren't here to be what I can't think of I
need most.
Because you aren't pouring me a scotch with your hands
all over the ice cubes.
Because the moon's another streetlight and your lights are
off and on in someone else's; because you warned me,
thinking were good, but you weren't.
Because I imagine your almost-skinny legs and ideal
ass from the back as you put more Debussy on the stereo
with the 10:00 AM sun deliciously licking you.
Because I'm in trouble, hotheaded,
bored with the necessary, and can't put on my jogging shoes
in spite of their blue Nike stride.
Because your mouth is wistful, off on the grand tour,
and I want to be every stop.
Because you won't stop long enough to get really
scared when you see how deep you go in me, how deep I
come inside you, inside you.
Let me go inside you and come up for more.
Because there are the soft syllabic fruits of Brazil
yet to taste and our 20 juicy fingers amoroso
on a white cotton shore.
In what country?
Is it meant for us?
Because we are changing each other's proportions
and how much there is to know.
Because you still believe you are always in control.
Oh, a syllogism is a safe place to be,
but not as mysterious as a rare Chablis.
Because I keep trying to be ambidextrous and adapt
to this double vision.
But my eyes hurt.
And in the last dream, you came right in
and went to sleep on my floor.
Because I want to tell you the truth.
And you think of yourself as not truthful enough.
But you listen and are sometimes coming nearer.
Because the old stories, you know them backwards.
You know them forwards.
And they need more pictures in them with windows,
and doorways, and smoke drawn in pencil curling out the chimney.
Because it's getting late and you know
you can fool almost anyone but me.
But so what?
There you are now in your fabulous brown Italian shoes--
the man whose soul I love and chest
under cotton shirt, which I bite into with this thought in spite
of those not quite open eyes, so intent on their hiding
you are careful of.
Because there's a saxophone playing between our telephones.
But you can't pick it up because of your other life,
the life that came first, that comes first tonight
even in our city, life I came after,
and other lives that I continue to come after.
Because logic always dictates an order, reasonable, one before
two, two before three.
Because I will not always be she who is willing to be logical,
not always be two, three.
Because I love the new in you and the years of us
but listen closely when you tell yourself to me how you never
want to hurt again someone, as though only one of us
were someone.
Because I want to do it, let's do it
to a brassy salsa trumpet.
Because I'm not on a dance floor with you,
but here hanging out with my shadow over a city of windows,
lit up, imagining another kind of life, almost like this one.