Prothalamion

The love we’ve defined for ourselves

in privacy, in suffering,

keeps both of us lonely as a fist,

but does intimacy mean a happy ending?

I’m afraid of marriage.

Driving past them at night, the shadows

on a drawn curtain hide terrible lives:

a father stuck in a job, his daughter

opening her blouse to strangers.

And your hands, for example,

like a warm liquid on my face

don’t evaporate as you take them away.

Nor are our betrayals silent,

although we listen only in passing.

We’re learning how to walk unlit streets,

to see threats instead of trees,

the right answer to a teenager

opening his knife. The answer is yes.

Always we couldn’t do otherwise.

Source: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)