POEM
Infidelity
“Talking only makes me feel more alone,”
you said once in the car outside the clinic.
Two years later, you spoke the same sentence
word for word one night after friends had gone.
Within a month, you’d erased yourself . . .
Erased? “To absent oneself,” I found scribbled on
a wrapper a year later . . .
Now sunlight and tree
shadow rush over the windshield of the car:
I’m talking with my new wife — then gone, absented.
“Sometimes I feel almost too much joy,”
you wrote from the balcony of your cheap
hotel in Paris. “What are you thinking?” she asks.
Light shutters across us. Wherever you are
in me I’m there, though it’s not what you wanted.
Source: Poetry (May 2008).
This poem originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Poetry.
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Philip White’s collection of poems, The Clearing, was published by Texas Tech in . . . MORE »
