I wait for you the way
a nonbeliever awaits God and judgment
That is, hunched over pretentious books
forehead warmed by a furious lamp
The words I scribble intermittently on scraps
in the dead of these fierce fall nights
stutter your name incessantly, incredulously
The questions strike me dumb time and again
If you ever come again, will I recognize your face?
Will it be the countenance I almost worshiped
stole glances at avariciously at the table?
The very cheeks I kissed, guilty and trembling
in the treacherous gardens of the imagination?
Will you say, at last, "Come to me. I am. Yours"?
Yet at this moment where I am
Absence has become a Cartesian certainty
There's nothing else but forty nights in the desert
perhaps years of wandering in the wilderness
howls of foreign streets, cars, and criminal desires
weeping for home and the love that never was
an apostate's heart that can only take so much
So now: I wait for you the way
A nonbeliever awaits judgment and God
