Jan Heller Levi

All my stories are about being left, all yours about leaving. So we should have known. Should have known to leave well enough alone; we knew, and we didn’t. You said let’s put our cards on the table, your card was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’t get till 4 am, so tired from wanting what we shouldn’t that when we finally found our heads, we’d lost our minds.Love, I wanted to call you so fast. But so slow you could taste each letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear. L, love, for let’s wait.O, for oh no, let’s not.V for the precious v between your deep breasts (and the virtue of your fingers in the voluptuous center of me.) Okay,E for enough. Dawn broke, or shattered. Once we’ve made the promises, it’s hard to add the prefix if. . . . But not so wrong to try. That means taking a lot of walks, which neither of us is good at, for different reasons, and nights up till 2 arguing whose reasons are better. Time and numbers count a lot in this. 13 years my marriage. 5 years you my friend. 4th of July weekend when something that begins in mist, by mistake (whose?), means too much has to end. I think we need an abacus to get our love on course, and one of us to oil the shining rods so we can keep the crazy beads clicking, clicking. It wasn’t a question of a perfect fit. Theoretically, it should be enough to say I left a man for a woman (90% of the world is content to leave it at that. Oh, lazy world) and when the woman lost her nerve, I left for greater concerns: when words like autonomy were useful, I used them, I confess. So I get what I deserve: a studio apartment he paid the rent on; bookshelves up to the ceiling she drove the screws for. And a skylight I sleep alone beneath, and two shiny quarters in my pocket to call one, then the other, or to call one twice. Once, twice, I threatened to leave him— remember? Now that I’ve done it, he says he doesn’t. I’m in a phonebooth at the corner of Bank and Greenwich; not a booth, exactly, but two sheets of glass to shiver between. This is called being street-smart: dialing a number that you know won’t be answered, but the message you leave leaves proof that you tried. And this, my two dearly beloveds, is this called hedging your bets? I fish out my other coin, turn it over in my fingers, press it into the slot. Hold it there. Let it drop.

Even if you didn’t have green eyes (in the bathtub, blue). Even if you didn’t have a lovely singing voice, or care for Alexandrine champagne some slow Saturday evenings to sing it through, it pleases me, your lips close to my ear, or when you’re a big girl, and I’m a big girl too. Five years difference between we two. Sometimes it hardly matters. I’ve decided to worship you, Diana, goddess of the forest— or is she the one of the hunt? Who cares? You remind me of her too. Some woman caught me up, breathless, in her strong arms, said breathe, darling. Her eyes were green-blue. Vague resemblances: that’s the daily news. Meaning: I’m willingly a fool for you any hour past midnight, and almost anytime in three-quarter view. Consider this, too: stumbling back, after a fight, to someplace we could call home, you and I have been known to duet a jubilee so funky it sounds like the blues. What steady arrows you shoot, Diana, become a goddess of the hearth: you whisper time to put the porchlight on, and we do. Who am I talking to? What is this strange glare, this prescience that you won’t be true? Sometimes you say something like even so, boo, and it sounds like breathe, darling. That’s why this one’s for you.