Summer, 1995

Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and
her husband, the floors filthy, one working burner
on the stove. Every morning I left her behind
in bed, holding me with a fierceness
I did not recognize as desperation, because
both of us were blind, we had invented this,
the parenthesis of a day between lovemaking,
the meals cooked naked, novels read to each other
aloud, the slow walks to a train station, floating,
holding hands as if one of us might zeppelin
away if untethered, and the pain, a knife through
the chest, at departing for just a few days.