One of Us Must Go - David Oates

[Lawrence Robinson]

One of Us Must Go


We had come at last to that time
when you can’t pretend
not to know.

And in a low, calm voice he said,
Let’s see if we can have
ten more good years together.

	*
How the stars laugh, 
making us disappear. Even a grove
can do it, lifting us up

until we are transparent,
our animal loves and needs 
suddenly scentlike, dissipating. 

One of us must go first.
The other will comfort, 
hold hands

and then be left, 
bereft. 
One.

	*
Why borrow the future’s grief?
 I’m in the present now, 
or would be.

He holds my head when it’s having
a bad day. I rub his shoulders
when all that coughing ties them tight.

And these twilight caresses seem
better than any young love I knew.
Yet one of us must go. 

	*
A single kiss remembered
is an epoch. Even a small kindness
stands in this world

like something larger than it can be, 
brief and grand and 
imponderable.

	*
Ten years we might get 
in this quiet space. Or not. 
Either way the song

grows richer by the day, 
scene by scene 
in willing suspension of disbelief,

that late, sage, almost youthful fullness
no poem, no prose, no lifting aria
has ever matched

in that time
when you can’t not know,
only love.

	- David Oates