Only Love
Christmas Eve descends with you on your knees
scrubbing the tub, the silent day having slipped down
the drain with the rain. The one friend called hours ago, so
there’ll be no more rings this silent night.
Your husband in name only has left you again,
gone to the shore with that woman who longs
to be more than his friend. You’re glad they’re gone,
though his absence offers little solace near this solstice.
Making your way downstairs to the same old ache
of the black-and-white classic re-running someone’s
Wonderful Life, you stare as George jumps off the bridge
and mumble, Why can’t that be me? But you know you’ll never
have the nerve, and Capra’s angel would drown in your river.
Your on-again off-again lover wrote you off
a quick email, too busy with family to call. And there’s still
the sorrow of tomorrow’s Christmas to be unwrapped, and no tree
to hide under. Later you’ll swallow a handful of pinks and yellows
to borrow some random sleep before morning hits you
that way it always does, pulse racing and a sense of dread
spread over the covers. If only, if only drums the season
with its incessant hymn, and nothing about the recent warm spell
will subdue the tune. In the kitchen, you drift
to the Neil Young song from a life you lived before.
What he said about love. How it breaks your heart. Still,
you look at that one beer in the fridge as though
it could change things. But no.
So you go and stare out the window
with a gaze that’s lost in the dark, resigned
to the lone refrain of the blinking lights next door.
• • •
Anne Rankin’s poems have appeared in The Healing Muse, Hole in the Head Review, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Whale Road Review, Kelp Journal, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in Abandoned Mine, The Bluebird Word, kern, Rattle, and Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.