Walking across the snow
to the garage behind my house
in Mt. Vernon, Ohio,
crooked and cold garage
where I’d tinker
with this old pawn-shop Stratocaster
deep in my post-divorce blues,
I did not expect
to open the door and find
a teenage couple going at it
like sheep in a prospect
of sun-dappled rye grass
between the mower and my erstwhile
weightlifting bench.
It was sweet how he draped
his stomach, his whole
torso over her back as if to shield
her, or himself, from my view.
What could I do? I said pardon.
I closed the door quietly
and walked toward
the house and tried not
to look out the kitchen window
like the envious creep
I didn’t want to become,
the one who, it occurs
to me now, might have been trying
to tell me something true, ever
applicable: there’s always porn.
Always memory. Always
a good reason to live alone,
of love and witness
the goings-on of shoulders,
breasts, the inimitable
glory and mess of romance
and hair and the brackish
scent that, an hour
later, lingered there.
The world will never end.