Nathan Erwin
Longing
My dog sits beside me, sniffing
my bare foot covered
in grass and flecks of black walnuts.
I think of my daughter growing in the cradle
of my wife’s hips as the sun shifts, exposing
the first red leaves in the maple.
I think of The Agony and Ecstasy
of Divine Discontent, old Persian words you used
to explain your life. So quietly
a leaf drops, the sun moves beyond
the clouded sky, and my dog perks up
at the sounds of a hundred acorns
tumbling down an oak. Downtown,
last night, I recited a poem to a crowded room
about an orchard and a rose garden
and drinking wine in an alley. And again, later,
to a rainy main street after the last bar closed.
You were not there. This morning,
you text me about the beginning of harvest
and labor shortages. I am waiting.
A crow caws and down the hill the last wisps
of chilling mist fade from the hollow, revealing
an old Ford stopped by the ditch,
windows open, I hear a voice, a clear tenor
running through last rags of night, I have a daughter
that the king does not have, she has a face that moon does not . . .
it begins before the wind picks up
and the car starts down the twisting road
and the song closes soft in the morning.
I stand, mute with wanting
a future lying quietly beside you, the curve
of the room obscuring a pile of discarded pasts. Somehow, I’m still
waiting. My cheek pressed against your belly, the pulse
of your thighs, our hearts beating slow and reliable
as a dream forming, as reliable as that voice, that song
of commons, cutting through the hollow into everything
that comes next. And I am here, still standing, lonely
in my whole body.