You may not know me yet,
but I’m learning just who you must be,
trusting you’re getting ready
for the rest of our lives.

Perhaps you’re already emptying
several mental drawers, clearing psychic
spaces for another razor, another coffee cup,
disrobing the slender shoulders
of a dozen wooden hangers
in the closet of your subtle heart.

Don’t worry, I’m not voyeuristic—
not strictly speaking anyway—
though I have been watching your
comings and goings—goings, mostly—
in the sector labeled maybe in my mind.

And you’ve surely bided your sweet time,
perhaps sometimes willingly, or as unwillingly
as I, waiting for the grip on our two fates—
on our two lines of blind perspective—
to converge at that distant but critical point
where we collide, and teeter, then tip
over an imagined ledge, falling, finally,
hopelessly into love. Meanwhile,

I’m enjoying the way the wind
will want to splay stray strands of hair
across your face as you pose for a corny photo
by a springtime pond, and how the waves
of your dear body, the surf
of your complicated soul, will form
and conform to the shores of mine—
and how this will work just as perfectly
the other way around.

The coffee’s made for, what,
the thirty-five-hundredth time?
Give or take. For a decade,
in four months. Love Buzz!
We joke, but that nails it,
and not just the coffee. Lord,
the buzz she brews in me.
Nights, too much streamed TV,
then the old novel I’m reading
dips for the fifth time. We say
“Click” when we spoon, the
ten-year ritual still a perfect fit.

			—for Suzy