AWAKE ALONE(DPC) Options

[Guest_Dan Culleton_*]

Awake and Alone (revised 8/3/09)

I live alone in a room on East Broadway in America.
It is raining here and the damp intrudes upon
the remembered warmth of this room. The cold
and the silence are your arms reaching for me.
You are in a country now from which there is no escape.
I search the faces in the street for some message from you.
No one meets my gaze. There is an arctic distance between us
which makes all frozen Russia seem a few feet of sun-baked beach.

I wait impatiently at my window for the long black car to arrive,
for the uniformed chauffeur, so silent, polite, to come for me.
I grind my teeth in the dark,
and the clock on the dresser grinds
which measured our nights with such speed:
you keep me awake at whose side I have slept so soundly.