I pay the price of three

In my next life, I will tell the story of this one 

and I will propose three endings; 

In the first one, we meet in school

and the story unfolds like a coming-of-age,

closed-lip kisses on campus and 

only a lapse of lovers' quarrels

—small fights that we laugh at, when we look back

We fumble when we sleep together, at first, 

awkward limbs tossing in blankets of warm flesh, 

and I listen to older women who tell me it will get better

We never leave the city, and prime the small tree growing in the garden,

for a baby. The folds of flesh on his plump arms

nuzzled by our lips in the evening. And the piano your parents give us,

never dusty in the mahogany walls of our walk-up, their keys 

lulled by three sets of hands. I write a novel that never gets bound into a book

and poems only for my baby to see.

In the second one, you leave me once a year for three years

After five, we no longer speak

By seven, we are strangers 

bound to the same space by occasional weddings and birthdays. 

You marry, and we both leave the city

I go North and you find warmer weather in the desert 

your last message goes unreturned, though I tell myself, 

I will write you one day. But we are both liars

committed to the sin of fantasy. 

I write because sadness looks prettier on paper. And my book

becomes a beacon for the left behind. We meet, one day,

in the aisle of a grocery store, when we visit our city. You tell me

she had your baby and we go for a drink to muse on our mistakes,

none of which we will apologize for. 

Because apologies live only in the choice to do it differently. 

Which we don’t make. 

You want to talk about fate, and the next life. I call it foolery. 

We never see each other again, but you hide in the lines of poems I write

in the breaths between notes of songs I hum 

as I leave the apartments of men I do not love as much as you.

A nail in my tire, fit just tight enough, so it won’t pop. And the bike chugs along

crippled, but moving.

In the last one, I am mindful when we meet

I will leave the country after school and return only for holidays

There will be years we don’t speak, 

but when we do, we chat like soft wind massages curtains of an open window

—fleeting, whimsical—the moment in the afternoon you tell your family about 

when they come home for the evening. 

You will know tenderness and I will know forgiveness, like an old friend 

our heads not yet filled with rue.

Desire, whittled away to an aching admiration 

for how we turned love into knowing. How, despite thirst,

we waited for the water to cool before we drank the tea. 

I am a poet, then, and how nice it is to write

not about you, but rather, the overgrown shrub, the love of a god 

cradled in prayer on the benches of the altar, 

And so, our later years are spent as friends

watching the mourning doves coo as they nest on my window sill

the condensation of sunrise, not yet wet against the glass.