I’m  Always  Thinking  About  You,  America

A way for us to begin when beginnings have passed us.
Before you saw him you knew exactly where you wanted to put your hands.
Casually, the light in that room became what you remembered of summer.
Days of slow mornings, days of nothing but nights.
Even in a time like ours, war ends and love too.
For now I will write about love.
Going every day to that place in you that is homeless.
How quiet you were the first time you saw your mother cry.
I’m always here, yes, writing or thinking about you.
Just like that it was autumn and not spring for a long time.
Kindness was somewhere in his hands, how they shook after crossing the border.
Listening to Glass and then Brahms to feel changed, suddenly.
Mundane pleasures: coffee, orgasm, a walk down First Street.
Nights that return in the daytime and you need to sit down.
Oh I want to stop here, what more can I tell you?
President Clinton on television while we were children.
Quietly typing in a square of light in a room where you lived while people died.
Reason is not needed with us, he said.
So, “I want to know who you are,” who the “I,” who the “we” is.
Today I am returning to everyone at least once in my mind.
Until I die I want to keep telling Rachel I love her.
Voices in the house where you grew up in an afternoon, in one gaze.
What do we look for when we say, “where are you going right now?”
Xoxoxoxo   x
Years that pass fast and slowly through us.
Zero apologies today but of course, there were things we did and didn’t do.

~~~~~

Alex Dimitrov’s first book of poems, Begging for It, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in early 2013. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize for younger poets from The American Poetry Review and the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, and Boston Review.