MONDAY: Reassurance to my Future Spouse, Airport Relativity

BY D. R. JAMES

The first poem was previously published in A Little Instability Without Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2006). The second poem was first published in Ithaca Lit. Copyright is held by the author.

Reassurance to My Future Spouse

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 scented 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 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, then 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.

Airport Relativity

First person and present tense
must strike you as odd —
how I could both greet and

record your emergence from
this crowd of funnelled souls,
recount details that never occurred,

at least not regarding your
arriving at 4:10, then 5:25,
and here I am, still, at 8:30, but

none of that matters, had or has
to happen, since I write whether
true or not as I wait, first see then

don’t see your distinctive stride,
your hazel gaze in seventeen other
rushing women before your

breakthrough just now and all those
other times with your amazed smile
and into my open lines.