WHEN LEAVES DON'T FALL FROM TREES

I have this fantasy. A girl breaks my heart. Thirty years later she comes knocking on my doorstep telling me that I was the only one she ever loved. Her one true love. She tells me she made this huge mistake in leaving me for dead and she wants to give us another try.
But alas, I tell her, I am happily married.

That's kind of lame of me, isn't it?
Who says I'll ever be the one true love of somebody's life?

I think it has something to do with fake whisper down the lane
and Holden Caulfield's ducks
and figuring out when leaves fall in Fall
and elevators to floor two
and how I do this thing where
if I drop an ice cube on the ground,
I just leave it there and hope it disappears.

And then there was this one girl I met.
She told me her friend was dying (cancer, I think)
and she accidentally killed this fly and then she thought,
now he's going to die for sure.
I think that girl was the love of my life.

:: More from THE ANCIENT BOOK OF HIP ::

*Excerpted poem from THE ANCIENT BOOK OF HIP with permission from author & Fourteen Hills Press