Some part of me believes there was no beginning to this eternal
thing between us, that even while my mother smoked
cigarettes on the couch and I was a bright lump beside her, you
were being born into this world for me to find. Some part of me is tired
of doing the dishes, of holding this sign, of chasing what glows
between us. Time passes, loops back. We were friends
for how many years before this? And what a joy it was to be your friend,
that part of us now filed between the work week and my eternal
begging to be touched. Not to mention the plains, coming snow glowing
in the opaque band of sunset behind our house. We smoke
a joint in it, but the landscape rubs you wrong, the sharpness of a tired
old bra strap, opening your skin. I want to make you
love it because it feels like a choice between here or you
and me, working my roots into the arid and unfriendly
soil until I can’t get up anymore. You are tired,
too, of my hopeless talk disguised as logic, the eternal
trademark winter of this place. There’s no smoke
detector inside the new apartment, the gas station glows
through the gauzy curtains all night. My breath glows
back, white puffs in the frigid upstairs. I love the way you
fall in love but sometimes I get jealous. Smoke
grey trash cat, wheatfields in snow, the friends
you make on airplanes. Isn’t there something more eternal
about that? A universe that never tires
of loving back. Moon, moon, ice on the window. I’m not tired.
I’m cataloging every iteration of us before my alarm rings, the orange glow
of the fireplace too bright to sleep. Even an eternity
ago, I pictured myself here. I was obsessed with you, you
said. We were drunk in a parking lot, two dogs with Reese’s cups in our teeth, friends
who could hardly breathe for wanting each other, for the smoke
from the West, biggest fire of the summer, the smoke,
too, of our own lives burning. Of course wanting is tiresome
but so is not. It’s 89 seconds to midnight and all I want is a friendlier
interior, less of my own counting and sour back of the tongue, glowering
over the semi-trucks shaking the walls and how loudly you
lie in bed. We won’t sleep tomorrow either. It scares me, the eternal
certainty of the past tense. The clock on the stove only ever glows
with this minute, even as it changes to the next. After you
cut my hair, you cut it again the next month, the single direction of eternity.