Losing the Light

Losing the Light by Cheryl Higgins UNSUPPORTED CODE - with a quote from J.D. McClatchy's three-part poem "Three Dreams of Elizabeth Bishop" UNSUPPORTED CODE What sold me on the architect's clever evening tour besides designer lighting and too many vodka bitters wasn't this relentless dawn scraping every skylight in every room, but chasing you into this one where the moon blued your foot behind the big chair wet, still, from testing the spa in your cocktail gown. When you snatched it back from the pale light it was then I thought I could live here with you, all folded against the west wall and listening to me pretend to lose interest and read erotic sonnets aloud to the moon. Or was it finding a corner of Cassiopia from your pillow unlike any other from mine? Did we live in this place? With this unsleepable light, I’m working before the paper even hits the door. Through the sliders on the redwood deck, a glass, still, of ginwater gathers gnats and acorns from the last one-night stand. My robe wet on the rail. I'm wearing yours. And why did I want to hurt you one last time? When you left I said leave it the robe's mine, but it wasn't not really or why did I give up my own to the ONS and stalk naked, moody, after I lost that first slurred slip of your name to the roaring tub. Your belt trails me and my coffee. The robe's too long for my tastes. Alien, familiar, it slides on my skin not unlike your more wakeful nights in and out of my dreams. And I thought I had something of yours after all from the pocket, a letter to me or a note declarant or confessional, either would do. What I found was some acorn caps and the architect's designer card. We'd called from a pay phone that night. I said we'd forgotten the price. You said I never asked. What we forgot, I heard a voice behind me say, was everything else. Love will leave us alone if we let it. Say the price. Out on the road, love winds away in the dark. The moon strobes it through the trees, the night follows its own unlit way.