Rockefeller Plaza

I’ve never been this way.

In love like this.

Happily writing a fantasy future

on the backs of my eyelids

on a bus, still smelling like you.

Somewhere in my head there is our house,

there is your ring, my desk,

and a closet with your wedding veil.

Pictures on walls of life yet lived.

Little jewelry boxes busting of rings, earrings.

There are ballerinas dancing

in music boxes for you. To the Nutcracker.

Tchaikovsky, you say.

I never knew the difference.

There are our dogs that come about as
often as presidents do.

And kids that stick around 
like Supreme Court justices.

Deeper, still, there are rainy days

as we lay in bed with the window open

and the cat you never wanted in the sill.

Things to dust. To water.

There are vacations we’ve yet to take.

Bags yet to pack and unpack.

There are Christmases in there, too.

Halloweens. New Years. Thanksgivings.
Birthdays. Candles. Cake.

Thousands of bottles of uncorked wine.

Family coming and leaving.

Games to play, like whiffle ball.

Socks to lose. Teeth to brush.

Kids with little stubby fingers playing piano,

running up stairs, leaving handprints on walls.

There are baths to give and take.

They’ve grown too fast.

There is coffee in the mornings.

Lazy weekends.
Babysitters trying on your shoes.

Trees to plant. Too many weeds to pull.

Love gives all things life, but a lack kills it.

Indifferently, but no less. Death is death.

There is no glory in it.

I see the ornaments on our trees.

The trails of sleds in the snow
of a hill out a window where we were.

Where we are yet to be.

My nose is still cold. Like your toes.

I can smell the fair fries and feel
your hand in mine

walking the cemetery where mom is buried.

You always give me time with her,

and you don't say anything when you come back
from wherever you go.

You just smile and offer me your hand.

I can feel the sand of the beach

where we’ve retired.

I’ve got flowers to buy for you
before you wake up.

A vase on our kitchen table to fill
that helps you remember and smile.

The way we are now, or yesterday.

Flowers always make you smile.

I’ve gone broke on orchids,

but made a fortune in you.

There’s an empty page to fill

with a poem I’ve surely written,

one way or another, a thousand times before.

Random thoughts from feelings in ink,

folded beneath that vase the same way
for forty four years.

There is a coffee mug that says,
“I love New York,” only the “love” is an apple,
and New York is just “NY.”

We bought it when we ice skated at Rockefeller Plaza,

all those years ago,

or a few months from now,

when we were young and the pages were mostly empty

but the dreams were heavy as wet sand.

We haven’t been there, yet.
But my ankle hurts from a triple Axel
I tried to impress you.

Yet...such an intriguing word.

We have a child, who hasn’t been born...yet.

But she has been.
I can see her in my mind.

A girl that surprised you and
changed all your color patterns.

It is, but it isn’t. It has been, but it hasn’t.

It is what you choose it to be.

This is your adventure.

Your page, yet to turn.

It helps not to beg or to desire it, but I do.

I do without so many spoken words.

I love you in silence, in scribbles on post-it notes.

In dreams that leave no room

for fear of my love being unrequited,

or not paid back. No return in kind.
A telephone left ringing that no one answers
in a quiet room. Plugged in a wall.

I wait to express that which so overwhelms me,
but I get so little time.

I wait for you to have this in your head,

or on the backs of your eyelids.

I wait more than I do anything.

 

One person can’t dream for two.

It exists, only if you give it life.

If you love like I love.

If not, it will wash or fade away.

Our child will never be born,

the ornaments never hung,

the holidays elsewhere spent,

Rockefeller Plaza still only on a TV,

and that old man once happily broke on orchids,

left to wander the beach,

forgetting he had flowers to buy

for a woman who still sleeps.

Somewhere.

I wonder if I dream too big for you.

If I love too much for us.

I hope your dreams dwarf mine, secretly.

And you’re just a master secret keeper.

That you feel what I write.

I wait like the porcelain ballerinas wait

for you to open the lid.

To give a bath, to sled a hill.

To say I do. And I do. Inside you.