And as I reach for him, the voices pause,

The music stops, and there is nothing there

But one voice laughing in another room.

SPEAKING OF LOVE

Speaking of love was difficult at first.

We groped for those lost, untarnished words

That parents never traded casually at home,

The radio had not devalued.

How little there seemed left to us.

So, speaking of love, we chose

The harsh and level language of denial

Knowing only what we did not wish to say,

Choosing silence in our terror of a lie.

For surely love existed before words.

But silence can become its own cliché,

And bodies lie as skillfully as words,

So one by one we spoke the easy lines

The other had resisted but desired,

Trusting that love renewed their innocence.

Was it then that words became unstuck?

That star no longer seemed enough for star?

Our borrowed speech demanded love so pure

And so beyond our power that we saw

How words were only forms of our regret.

And so at last we speak again of love,

Now that there is nothing left unsaid,

Surrendering our voices to the past,

Which has betrayed us. Each of us alone,

With no words left to summon back our love.

EQUATIONS OF THE LIGHT

Turning the corner, we discovered it

just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on—

a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long

resting between the noisy avenues.

The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves

across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window

glowing through the ivy-decked facade

promised lives as perfect as the light.

Walking beneath the trees, we counted all

the high black doors of houses bolted shut.

And yet we could have opened any door,

entered any room the evening offered.

Or were we so deluded by the strange

equations of the light, the vagrant wind

searching the trees, that we believed this brief

conjunction of our separate lives was real?

It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,

a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,

a curl of smoke flaring from a match,

haunting a world it could not touch or hear.

There should have been a greeting or a sign,

the smile of a stranger, something beyond

the soft refusals of the summer air

and children trading secrets on the steps.

Traffic bellowed from the avenue.

Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall,

and at the end what else could we have done

but turn the corner back into our life?

THE VOYEUR

… and watching her undress across the room,

oblivious of him, watching as her slip

falls soundlessly and disappears in shadow,

and the dim lamplight makes her curving frame

seem momentarily both luminous

and insubstantial—like the shadow of a cloud

drifting across a hillside far away.

Watching her turn away, this slender ghost,

this silhouette of mystery, his wife,

walk naked to her bath, the room around her

so long familiar that it is, like him,