I don’t think it was you. I don’t think it was me.
Were you blind, too? Did you see?
My emotions conquered me.
I remember, before a kiss, drinking a cold glass of water;
In all my love adventures, that strange contrast is what I most remember.
That sudden cold drink. I don’t remember her.
I changed my mind a thousand times
In those years when I was beautiful, and making rhymes
And had curls and curls of dark brown hair
And woke, forgetting her. And nothing was fair.
It is the greatest joy
When girlish qualities inhabit a boy
Who is yet a man and poetry
Gets you through it all even when you are a jerk and that’s what happened to me.
I made too much of those vain attempts. I wept thoroughly
For others’ verse. I derided and left it for dead in my poetry.
I suffered in the brown rooms
But recovered in well-lit ones.
You should have seen those rectangular rooms! And the furniture!
The women came and went. Even her.
Emotions! But love is not these things!
Love flowed away in the advice they gave me.
Love lies in the cold and icy springs.
