Henry & June

Published in Everyone's a fucking poet! 1995

The theatre was nearly empty;
I could have filled it 
with imagination but 
I understood the silence 
and the vaccuous uncertainty.
In the dim lights and the 
distance between my eyes 
and yours, I recognized the space 
around the ends of our fingers,
an unfinished bridge
spanning the chasm 
between trust and abandon.
I put my hands at my sides.

The film started. I sat at the edge 
of high school daydreams.
Anaïs Nin was more erotic 
than history itself or the letters
she wrote to Henry Miller.
He responded in person. I 
wrote you poems across town 
with no return address but 
you knew where to find me.

You never came.
We will never go to Paris. 
Your eyes never left the screen
and I never stopped wondering.

Things I couldn't imagine
unfolded like outdated maps
over discomforting terrain.

When I admit to being lost 
I do so with novelty, adventure,
the casual lust of expatriots.

I am sitting cross-legged 
in the seat beside you,
and we are not 
together. We follow 
our own sense of romance.
The signposts of experience,
cobblestone streets 
and literature,
will stay between us :

who love apart or do not
love at all, the unspoken sorrow
of leaving, or never having been there.

I took you home.