O Anna Lynn, You Must Have Known

So truly uninformed I was when it came

to the mechanics of love, that I donned

the condom a little early; it kept falling off

on the three-mile walk before I tapped

on the glass and you shimmied out your window

and we made for the weedy hilltop where

we gazed for a nearly unbearable moment

at the moon’s twin in the drainage pond

and you spread the slightly mildewed blanket

of our long-awaited consummation

while I tugged the ribbed but not quite lubricated

master of awkward ceremonies back on.

How soon you said Is that all? Miracle was,

there was even that much. I was so hot

for you, slobbering all over that wisp of hair

loose from the braid behind your ear,

everything sliding together just right

in the big bang universe of our love,

which must have lasted at least thirty seconds.

You sighed, tugged your jeans back on,

while I fumbled through my backpack

for to share with you—food of the gods—

a paper-clipped bag of Fritos. I remember

watching you re-snap your bra, thinking

boobs, tits, breasts, jugs, what stupid,

insufficient words. Naturally, you took up

with an older boy, though still kind

to me when we passed between classes: I held

my books in front of my crotch

trying to hide the erection that visited me,

for no apparent reason, each morning

at nine a.m. And then? Soon after we

abandoned those halls with their lockers like rows

of uniform sarcophagi, you fled

to college. Probably you married. Maybe divorced.

Maybe nothing turned out like you hoped

and you sit up smoking Pall Malls

in your nightgown, while in your kitchen window

the same moon that once graced our bodies

now illuminates nothing so much

as the most recent in a long line

of disappointments that you’ve grown to accept

as the ubiquitous background of your

early middle age, which has nothing

to do with me, though I still wonder

what I might say if I saw you again,

aglow beneath the nimbus of my complete

embarrassment. O Anna Lynn, sorry

to have delivered unto you my mid-pubescent

and self-maligning heart there by the pond

that we called the lagoon. But tell me

you’re alone. Tell me the history of your discontent.

Tell me why you returned to me

when I sat this morning on the back porch,

waiting for the coffee, recounting

it all, the grass still wet with last night’s fog.