Before the World Was on Fire
I want to remember the big silliness, the night
we weren’t even that drunk or stoned and ran
outside, smack into the impossibly cold air
shouting jokes that weren’t funny to anyone—
except us, of course—-our ungloved knuckles
aching in the wind, the sky blanketed over
and black. Later, we laughed and laughed on
mattresses alone or together in dorm rooms,
till we turned quiet and amazed at the elegance
of bare trees floodlit outside our naked windows
as we crashed into sleep like we meant it and
man, did we ever. That was before the world
was on fire, but we didn’t know it. Nobody
even owned a TV. Instead came the two AM
knock on the door: always a friend, either
joyous or heartbroken, always dead earnest
in explaining it all, everything: that long talk.
Awake till dawn, that stinging bright dizziness.
Forty-five years later, we rustle Op-Ed pages,
our parents outlived, our wives, our husbands,
our divorces. The queasy hearts of various cities
yellow our horizons. Whatever we were has fled—
or not. Above our locked houses the moon dissolves
under the clouds. Anyone can smell that wet wind.
