Walking to my room from the park

where I’d been sunning

my words on a bench with a buddy,

I passed a couple of women

and it seemed to me

as they walked and talked

they were weeping.

I continued on, and another

woman passed, and she too

seemed to have come

from somewhere mournful,

her eyes at once dry and yet

inconspicuously weeping.

I looked this way and that

at the corner, hoping

to find the source

of the sudden feeling

that someone had died,

someone I knew in the neighborhood,

but I could find nothing.

Could it have been your despair,

dear woman with whom I’ve lived

but live no longer,

two hours before you came to visit

and tell of it?  Could your wandering

mournfulness have come to me

in the glisten of those women’s eyes?

O friend, see, even as we

stroke our bliss

of sadness away,

a blush subsists

under the sallow

skins of one or another

of our addictions,

like the unforgettable blush

on that woman’s face

in the hotel corridor

in the small town

in Romania

in the morning,

lactic with roses,

innocent and enduring and smiling

as if she had something

profoundly to do

with the awful physical night

of smoke and poisons and violence

that we are forced every day

to lug along with our bodies

into the sunlight.