small favors

last night at the bar where
we sometimes see each other.

there is a show,
music fills the spaces left between
the bodies of all the people who
come and go through a little place like that.

i am working in a club across town
so i do not hear,
until i am home,
and from a boy who did not see,
about the the someone who was struck,
the man who is a man no more
because a car sent him from this world to the next
at the corner just outside the bar.

and i do not know
his name or even
the color of his hair,
only that a body lies in a pool of blood
in the middle of the street--

it could be you,
it could be you.

and the news won't say a thing
and the boy wants comforting
but his body makes too too much noise lying in the bed beside me while
maybe you are expiring on the pavement
and i am not there to collect you.

no, i cannot sleep
next to this whole and breathing body
so i leave it in the other room
and curl up in the darkest place i know
wrapped in the blanket we once wrapped ourselves into.

and as i sleep my dreams are
Empty,
when so often they are
full of You.

and in the morning,
waiting for a word
and there it is:
You are alive!

Alive!

And breathing and sleeping and alive, somewhere,
it doesn't matter where,
and now I know that I can live without you
no matter who you live with
or where you keep your body,
so long as you do
and so long as your noisy breathing
keeps someone up at night.

I make breakfast and it is the best food
I have eaten in a long time,
and really the boy isn't all that bad.

You are alive.
You are alive.
You are alive.

Thank God for that.

(from Se Refiere a Nosotros: Poems for You)