Should I have asked? I did love
when you reached across the wide, 
circular table of the booth you let me have, 
my books, my bits of paper, 
curling off the edges like some 
accountant who couldn’t afford office rent.
That long stretch to place my cup 
was so I could see there was still beauty 
in those breasts, that real blonde hair
so neatly tucked, saved for some right fellow, 
some father for the two kids you had

sleeping in that rusted orange Ranchero 
in the parking lot one day you came in just
to get your check and your engine’s hiccup
soothed. You showed them to me as if
to say, Do you know what you’d be asking if you ask?
your face pinched like a child’s, opening up 
when it was just the carburetor stuck and you 
the means to take them wherever it was you went. 
They never even moved, that girl, that little man,
sleeping, bound, like pupae, in white blankets,
trusting dreams would set them free.
You kept my table for nothing
that long, poor winter of wild scribbling.
 
It was as if you understood that what I did
needed doing first. I remember rain
fell a lot; it was a fallen world. I even asked 
around the way those who grow up with cattle will,
toeing the dirt, staring at the ground 
as if a random boot scuff in the dust
might trace a rib or some other sign and found  
you came from good stock, married wrong, 
but held your own ground, fairly.

Mornings you came to bring my cup, 
your eyes, open sky, one knee on the upholstered
seat, your arm grazing mine, electric, as you poured, 
as into me, a taste of what could be. 
And I, profoundly dumb, useless 
with my papers, held up, in each hand,
that afternoon I figured out we would
stay, both of us, attendant to our stations. 

Silenced, I watched the wind swinging, dead 
cold out of the east, swaying metal signs along 
the street, darkening the plate glass windows		         
so that I could see my face, lean, and staring back
knowing all that was written in that place was writ by rain.