It Could Have Been So Easy

by Anna Ruiz

It could have been easy,
so easy,
but we’re just a man
and a woman and somehow still
find impossible variations of 26 letters,
form hard words that find ways to hurt one another,
that cut the rhyme and rhythm of love’s heartbeat
into single offerings of what we serve to
one another on that purloined plate, having dined
on our surreptitious egos and calculating fears.

I could have held your hand even though you are
so far away, we might have shared our grief when
we shared our aloneness
on a lonely hill,
you lost in your thoughts,
me losing my way in you.

Silly things are of an occasional dream--
you might have held me close to your heart when
I found the fruit of my womb—
and I fed you the fleshy part of myself,
silently beside you,
even though
you had banished me...

And what we’re left with
now...
is these self-sustaining
and pithless words,

...to be read in any light,
under the monsoon of recollection,
or the black-holed sun that flies across
the Milky Way patterns of destiny
casting no shadow
near the Dawn Tree,

Dali hangs a limpid timepiece
sings: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, coming for
to carry me home...”
and you know that home is where the heart
is, and we’re both little lost sheep, you with the blue bow,
me with the pink,

and we’re both heading nowhere again,
we could have done wondrous things together,
we could have been contenders,
we should have been Lovers
..distanced forever....

we are.