My Antidote

for Mirela

I remember when I first saw you on that snowy porch in the Iowan night-shine. Tree branches were giving themselves freely to the wind and then my eyelids disappeared. “I’ll savor you like a sugar cube,” I thought, but days have a way of pouring in one ear and out the other. My muddy boots have a way of leaving muddy tracks on the Bostick House hallway carpet. Later, I was about to lift up my head in defeat, when among the riverbank’s pebbles I found it: a heart-shaped stone in Filiasi as big as your left breast. I carried it across an ocean to Chicago. Alas, nighttime clouds don’t matter the same way in the daytime. Each one of us is a mousetrap for the other, a cube of cheese for the other, a taste that lingers on the tongue for the other. You are my antidote.