The Arms That Wouldn’t Let Me Go

On this sweet, rainy evening

My thoughts run to you

Like water towards the ocean

In the city’s gutters and roofs

Towards countless drainstorms

Powerless in the face

Of a calculated incline.

It is a sweet rain that is falling tonight

It wears your scent of promises

It is music, it sings of gentle breezes through wooden wind charms,

Of a veranda in the Caribbeans.

A scattering of drops

Like miniscule sand pebbles on my books

As I wait.

O Night, your silence descends upon me like a mantle

It calms me

I could write lines like an ode to your burning eyes

Your long, long lashes that caught my tears

Brushed away listless years

And changed me.

Tonight I don’t see the bus stop in front of me

Or the muted lights of cars

I see you waiting for me on that street

The staircase that separated me from bliss

[I met my two loves on the steps of Italian cathedrals,

they gave me their blessings]

I know you are there

And when you see me, your eyes smile stars,

twinkling benign in the skies between us.

If the world ended in two days,

As predicted,

I would have felt safe

Your broad shoulders would have protected me

From all the walls and crumbling houses of the City.

Sleep, days, a thin membrane

Before and after us

A tender gauze between dusk and your sunset skin.

We stole nights

Like compassionate thieves

Time measured in kisses

A perfect, impossible life

Soft like the sound of a far-away gramophone

Or a clavichord in Vienna

(Will you come with me to cobbled alley-ed Vienna?)

I am home now

The lanes are deserted and streetlights have relinquished

their daytime tyranny

The night is wide with the tabac scent

Of water falling on hot concrete and asphalt

It is a summer night somewhen, somewhere else.

I am home now

The house is still

And bathed in red solitude

I need to stop writing

And conjure up what I’ll be wearing tomorrow

I need to stop thinking

That I could die happy tonight.

San Diego, April 25, 2012