I backed into you, eyes closed and reeling.
When I opened up we were already far gone—
rambling nothings about velociraptors and Moon River,
and the way Humphrey Bogart kissed Ingrid Bergman.
You sped your blue bike past our first kiss.
Came back, hands on my waist,
hands in my long dirty blonde hair,
me wearing a cotton dress—
like it’s supposed to be when you think about how it’s supposed to be.
Lips and your beard and dark doorways
and the sense that I didn’t quite understand how the stars hung that way,
or the way we’d partied and drank Coronas
at a prison where men had languished and died in
feverish, dreamless solitude,
where they had locked up Al Capone until
time slipped on and on enough,
and suddenly we were drunk and shouting “Vive la France,”
eating cake a woman tossed to us from a mossy stone tower
in a pink Victorian dress.
We were beer-soaked and hazy, hungry and lonely,
and your lips felt like
a fucking homecoming dance.
History can dump itself out into us,
you and I making out like children on the stoop in Francisville
while the old black women “Hmm” from inside windows
and on chained Adirondack chairs on the street
and all of time can tumble into this moment where you somehow got
here, kissing me where gangsters paid their gritty penance
and gunfire hazed the air
and the city was segregated
and a bomb was dropped
and you almost died a baby in a Rwandan genocide
and I almost moved to New York
and somehow your lips are still on my lips
and the world just collapsed in on its impatient self.