The Temptation of Meaning

You would like to forget
our climb up the Indian hill.
But it’s like me to remember that it was a
balmy Missouri day and that
I wore a peach cotton shirt,
boasting golden, freckled shoulders.
I could tell I made you nervous.

I have thought about forgetting and
I know now that my memory wants for pain.
It forages for you, in dusty bars and parking lots,
wanting you to look, just look:

This is the slope where we pulled ahead of the others,
hoped that five minutes to ourselves
on the side of a Honduran dirt road
might help us age.

And then our holiday at the coast, which
cannot be recalled with sounds, only the bravado of
our young umbrella-ed bodies
and the taunting of the waves, which understood
the need to retreat, the need to come alone next time.

Remember my hand when we ran through the frozen city.
My hip, cupped in your palm, on the dark train ride home.

We loved the ellipses between us and them,
a hushed plane where we used to meet and
speak in our own coded and referenced tongue.
There, we laced our hands together
and sorrowed and swooned.
You touched my face. Your arms called me over
to sit on the grass,
on our knees,
on the hope of a life braided together.

For years now, you will ascend into drumbeats and the
fast company of a dissolving dream.
You’ll be unable the stomach the thought of your old selves
acting on a young heart,
abiding by innocence,
sinking their hands into my tangled hair.
You’ll loathe
the fantastic twinge that still passes between us.

Lindsay Sihilling