You’ve Been Wrong Before
She fell off her bike
into the dark street
dropping my flask
She fell off her bike
into the dark street
dropping my flask
“Are you ok?”
Her hands looked scraped,
but she laughed
I felt a bush tear at my face
and saw my bike upside down, wheels spinning,
spokes chopping at stars and an airplane passing
in an unlit, unfamiliar suburb
we were still three miles from home
I ask her, “Did you ever think you were going to marry one of them?”
She said yes, a few times.
“But you didn’t.”
She shook her head against the ground,
black hair dripping into the pavement
strugging to feel gravity out of a curb
with someone’s house number painted on it
I never met any of them, but I saw them in photos
Her parents kept them up on the walls
like former presidents or mayors
The United Republic of Our Daughter
Governed responsibly since 2004.
“Do you think you’ll marry me?”
She says she doesn’t think so.
And I can see her point -
the night was hardly an image you’d frame
We were not posing,
hand on the small of her back
black dress for expensive foreign food;
Our nights were never like that
Smile you drunken fools
have the maitre de get one of all of us
now with Aunt Clara
When there’s no one there to hold a camera,
that’s when we’re at our peak
Gliding on fixies through parking lots wet with yesterday’s rain
pushing V-shaped trails from beneath us like renegade jet skis
going close to shore but never touching
“I don’t know.” I insist. “You’ve been wrong so far.”
I promised that night I’d make a liar out of you
That wall of former lovers, it does not intimidate me
We fill more than a frame
The moments when our cold hands touch blurt polaroid
in messy, long-exposure proliferation
corners touch,
a seamless mosaic
enough to fill a wall
enough to fill a museum
I’d build you a museum
of every day spent with you
and every moment my mind crystalized to film
And right in the middle, in a big gaudy frame,
A still of you lying with your head on my shoulder
in the middle of a dark, empty street
Bike wheels spinning in fuitile effort
to make friction with pavement
and take us both home
