Love, if it’s anything, is a polaroid of my mother,
standing at twenty-three besides a chestnut horse,
its head nestled against her shoulder.
She’s looking at something off camera,
like someone is calling her name, like a stranger.
When I was seventeen, she asked me if I had to steal
everything I had to write.
I was silent then, I didn’t know the answer,
but the truth is I probably do.
Like the birds that land on the house, nameless,
Writing like love is like leaving a candle to burn
in a field that someone might never see,
no one cares, none of it matters to anyone but you.
In my dreams last night, I dreamt of a girl
I kissed in high school, in a wooden shack
where the janitor kept brooms,
but I was nothing then, I was afraid to pull her close to me
so we listened to the river running,
and of my father, when his hair was still
a handful of long reeds and he looked at me,
thirty-three years year old, standing in a Toys R Us aisle,
the day my younger sister was born
that I didn’t know who I was any longer.
When I woke, it was the heat of late summer,
there was no light on the wall,
for years when someone asked, I would say I wanted
anyone who did not dream for months
Of the wolves who had eyes that were as black as my mother’s,
but this is my life
and if I had to do it again,
and draw myself from the shadows,
there are worse things that I could be.
The 22nd Row 