Robert

I learned that
Robert
Was not to depend on
For company at Christmas,
Or raising children or
Planting gardens.

He was to share coffee at dawn
In a strange house
In someone else’s neighborhood;
To jog though the park
In the haze of November
And laugh at a fat lady
On a moped, more because
We had been lovers than
Because she was fat or the
Moped tiny, or gravity unfair.

That is not to say
I did not love him then,
But that I needed to
Fill the empty rooms
I felt forming in my future,
Rooms that could not stay empty
Without spreading into the endless,
Dustless, white desert of a dream
That will not come together
At the end of a night.

The shimmering mist of laughter
Two lovers share beneath the trees
In November will not easily trade
For a family, fat, dull and certain,
And oddly favored by gravity.