Affair
I pass your house
and look up in the dark;
we hardly see each
other anymore.
Someday I’ll wake
and hardly think of you;
don’t think I won’t
be grateful. I will be.
The first two weeks
without you I lost
in nights of
unrecollected being. Who hasn’t had
his own private
hell? Oh, yes. Mine was pure
and simple those
months of pain
no one could see me
through.
Not that you loved
me. Or I loved you.
Once, we thought we
were in Paradise. We were not.
In the end,
confessions, confidences kept us
up half the night;
the dawn birds found us
dead tired, clenched
on the emotional,
the recriminations
and torn-up loyalties,
the dreariness of
things gone wrong for good.
Loneliness is like
the upper floor of a house like this,
where you live
alone, afraid to look
through windows wide
upon a thousand worlds
you thought you
knew.
