Because there is a phone booth
in St. Paul, where I want to be kissed
swift as a stolen car going nautical
in the rain. Jinxed and put on love’s
blacklist, I had flunked all the tests.
Got sent to the principal’s desk,
(a pendulum and a metronome)
for dreaming improbable dreams.
I kept a diary in my head for
the complexity of living rooms.
Doors creaked like sugar
to a toothache. Loneliness bodes tight
to a body stowed in a trunk.
Because there is still room
for heft and kindness, we found
love’s office in a movie theatre.
I wept over a fish that reminded
me of my dad. A bounty of sound
wooed us, all by a man sweeping
the silence and moving it. Your fingers
wove something resolute into mine,
as if to catch a baseball or a snowflake
on the tongue. You found my
best kept secrets—There crooked into
the top shelf of memory’s tree house,
the letter you carried with everything
gathered from the earth—string,
three theories of an argument, a lock of hair.
A life-time of words scratched in
the walls of a shot-gun shanty
lit-up beside a river—where grace
is nestled between to protect us
from the elements and the answers.