FIRST LOVE

FIRST LOVE

     —after Billy Collins' Going Out for Cigarettes

The story goes, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. 

Nothing famous about it. One day, he 

walked out, moved back to the suburbs. 

They took him in, swallowed him up,

it was a slow suicide of self. 

I never heard from him again, 

not a letter, not a phone call, nada. 

I mourned for what was lost. 

It was as if those seven years were for naught. 

In seven years our cells replace themselves. 

We were not the same—even though seven years 

was a marriage sentence of sorts. He left me in spring 

when the words began to rise like first sap.

He left me when I became a writer, 

as if the words themselves were unfaithful wives. 

As if I needed the corpse of experience to hone 

and sharpen my nascent sullied craft.

Decades later, his first girlfriend, Dulcie—

whom he had left for me, 

and then in a boomerang move, 

he left me again for her—we became friends, 

we shared war stories that mirrored each other.

We were sisters of the same cloth, 

rent with holes and jagged three-corner tears. 

It was as if Bob had become a lost vanishing point, 

a two-point perspective laid down in lead,

the horizon-line on an architectural drawing, 

disappearing into the infinite, off the edges of the page,

only to reappear in the house of memory 

like a möbius strip endlessly repeating its cycle.

But theses days, no one can hide forever.

We found him on the Internet. The woman he married 

looked a lot like me, but her sullen face said it all.

Needing to put old dogs to rest, Dulcie wrote to him, 

but silence was the loud reply. What did she expect?

You can't teach an old dog....

However, his sister was delighted to hear from us,

as he had given her the cold shoulder too—

just like he gave us so many years ago.

A family gift from his long dead father.

We put Bob to rest that day, no more 

dog-eared pages or sticky forays into the past.

Some 40 years later, I’m still wedded to my word-wives,

those dark rubies glistening like blood.

2/2/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class  First final draft.

First real draft, abandoned for the electronic page. Hand draft was shyte. The story goes, it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. Nothing famous about it. One day, he moved back to the suburbs. They reclaimed him as their own, they took him in, swallowed him up, reprogrammed him. I never heard from him again, not a letter, not a phone call, nothing. It was as if seven years was for naught. But in seven years, cells replace themselves.  We were different people than when we were young. The distance of seven years is a marriage of sorts. He left me in the spring. When I became a writer. He didn’t like that, As if the words themselves were unfaithful wives. he gave me the cold treatment, refused to even speak of me.decades later, an old girlfriend whom he left me for her comment we teamed up and found him on the Internet. She wrote to him but he never wrote back his sister was delighted. Apparently he was giving her the cold treatment just like he gave me.