Why save something so sad

I wish I could turn invisible but
I have to wear my pajamas and
show up at your doorway crying,
three in the morning, full of shame
and wishing I could give you
something more worthwhile
for your time. And you say, "I hate
to see you upset," like I hate to see
the sky grey on Halloween and like
I hate other things that I haven't
learned yet because I don't know
myself in this place or anywhere really.

The Mathematical Language of Cats

On the night we met in the studio, the open window

sang late summer love songs to the purr of the street.

Honestly, you intimidated me: the coolest girl in school.

All I could think to say was, "You remind me of someone else."

As you laughed you set your cigarette to smoking

and handed me a beer off the sill; we waited. 

That winter, you went into the convenience store while I waited

on the sidewalk, warming my hands in the glow of the windows.

My brain reeled from the drink and the cigarettes you'd smoked

like you were trying to melt all the snow on Main Street,

like you'd burn enough matches to be somewhere else

where the wind wouldn't howl like cats on the way back to school.

The next summer we tried to grow up. I taught middle school

while you worked at the grocery store, read novels, and waited

for the boy you loved to treat you like someone else. 

But at night we could sit on the porch, eating dinner by the window

and watching the stray cats run the length of Oberlin Street.

We laughed through our self doubt, the cigarettes smoking

between your fingers just for the sake of watching them smoke.

Then the year when I slept on your couch, a year spent driving streets

and drinking tea in your family's kitchen after school,

a year that we wrote each other out of what we were waiting

for, a year that we sat in my living room with no windows,

and we never said what we meant, talked of anything else.

The truth is that every cat I've ever owned lives with someone else

now. It isn't that I don't love them, but they always dissolve like smoke

while my back is turned, onto the sills of other people's windows.

Eventually I knew I could never go back to teaching school.

I wonder what you do when we don't talk, whether you wait

for me to show up outside, howling like a cat in the street,

whether you remember that May-purple night on Oberlin street

where we ate dinner on boxes packed by someone else,

two people who couldn't be us. Or maybe you think of how you waited

for me to disappoint you by never getting tired of smoking

in your parents' attic even when we knew there was school

in the morning. Maybe you just sit, reading, in your window.

This summer, before I left for good, I parked on your street; we took up places and smoked

on the porch, each wishing outselves someplace else. You might teach school,

I am just waiting for what's next, while your cat curls on the sill of the open window.

August 23, 2016

The dogs burst forth from their cage only
to settle on the sofa: auburn heaps of
sleep, premonitory visions of autumn.
Somewhere here there are childhoods,
but having lived mine elsewhere, I see
only a quiet stretch of questions and
singularity like the whirring of a quilt being
washed again and again in another room's
laundry.