Deep Poems

We don't say I love you anymore. We say: your phone is at eleven percent. We say: I picked up the thing for your knee. We say: there's soup. I used to think this was a lesser language, a falling off from the time you'd write my name on the steam of the bathroom mirror or drive forty minutes for a specific pastry I'd mentioned once, in passing. But last night you got up at three because I coughed, and came back with water and didn't say a word— just set it on the nightstand and went back to sleep as if this were a thing that required no discussion, as if love at this stage were not a grand announcement but a glass of water, delivered in the dark, without being asked.

I used to draw the map with more on it— the house would be bigger, the job would have a window, the love would be the kind they write about in songs. Somewhere around thirty-five the map simplified. Now it has: one good chair, a window facing east, someone to call when the news is bad, a body that gets me from the bed to the kitchen without asking anything in return. I have stopped touring the rooms of the life I didn't build. I live in this one now— smaller than expected, less impressive from the street, but warm in the places that matter, and mine in the way that only things you've stopped trying to improve can truly be yours. The map says: you are here. For the first time I don't need it to say where else I could be.

When I was young, the afternoons were countries with no border known, and summer hummed its lazy tunes through fields where I could walk alone. But somewhere in my thirties, time began to run a different race— the hours lost their easy rhyme, the days picked up a stranger's pace. Now Tuesday bleeds through Wednesday's door, and months go by like passing cars. I swear that I've been here before— same intersection, same red stars. The clock says nothing I don't know. It only says: you ought to go.