That Night in the Pickerel


That such would come to me in the Pickerel,
amid the footballers and the undergraduates,
never crossed my mind.

But listen, here’s a lesson:
they who are not wanting, get;
they who are not seeking, find.

Complex and whispering, like those poems
I love so well, a man after my own heart,
I would say, if I knew what to my own heart

came after, or before, or any way at all.
But I know the catch in my throat at leaving
is all you–some hours together, then apart.

The “apart” is what tells you how long time is.
Time for faces to fade to some conventional beauty,
voices to take on memory’s demeaning trill.

Let night be no more bewildered, friend, than I.
Time is not that wide, nor the sea that deep.
I have said that I will be for you. I will.