This is how it is:   the love is the law

         and every city's applied skyliner

glosses over the difference between December

    and Valentine's when we are too cool

for the thinnest parts of winter. I was sure

                       I loved a boy who lived

                 three blocks from the park and would wait

with my back to the water for his dark-lit grin;

       I later learned my love, like a flame, had been wicked

away by the city's coldest reaches, with its vastness of people,

           its sprawling fingers that touched our bodies

in the corners of alleys, the glimmer from the zipper of our jeans

the only light in plain view: what a thing

                         to learn about your love: how we wait

    too long in the failing light. How we all, eventually,

   test the thin ice. We all have those names that break

through the veneers of sleep, the silly lies

           we tell the ones we love when they ask us

                                                                         what we've dreamed.