I turned you into a proverb in the summer
I left my twenties behind, with more names than you
and I had at the beginning of all this.
But I remember: how I loved you
on Ashburn and Mandeville, College Drive and Canora,
at the altar, the Alt Hotel, and Roslyn Road.
I remember how I hid from your pining
in the bathroom at a Halloween party and how your friend
Claire was just outside the door, her coarse
whisper an echo across the next four years
just ask her ask her ask her and how I was dressed as
Mia Wallace from that Quentin Tarantino film.
You turned into somebody else on a day
in late February. I was lying on your mattress wearing only your
sheets and I pulled Nabokov from the bedside bookshelf.
Later you confessed how you felt that morning
as you emerged from the bathroom and saw me reading
in the white sun and how you just
stared.
We tried parishes and poetry but even those
words we sang into psalms of each other could not
save us. In the choir, I remember you
sitting in the tenor section, the way you looked at me
with a solemn sweetness, before the summer we had only
a window box air conditioner and I could not
put a finger on the immensity of our love
anymore, how your name would forever
and never be enough for me.