So I moved my side of the story, out

of our fourth apartment and its sagging floor,

on a block where the teens jeered me,

long-haired man of twenty-eight.

Hey, Harvard Square! Yes, I knew where

Harvard Square was. I’d walked through it,

for that matter, contaminated by association.

 

But I moved my story because she was

moving her side too, and away from me.

 

My brother said, there’s room to stuff

whatever I had that I called my self,

a room-worth of whatnot, at the address

where he’d landed. He was also flung out

from a couple he’d been half of.

What’s more, our parents were separated –

barricaded inside my crisis, I could barely

guess at what forced their months alone.

Nineteen-eighty-three: some year.

 

My split-up self came to an enclosed porch

with what I still carried through:

first, from college, a real girlfriend,

and our first apartment’s theater-student crowd,

then barely-adult new-marrieds in our second,

baffled lovers next, in a cockroached third.

 

Last, the fourth apartment, weak in the center

with infidelity. Mine. The remains berthed

with me, on the windowed porch of the fifth.

 

Perched without the scrawniest branch to grab at,

abrupt bachelor in a student-village crash pad,

without sense for how narrow the ledge was

where I’d landed. A “second she” promised –

almost – by one arm-in-arm late-evening ramble,

sweet words. But without an arrow pointing

at the long fall coming, or the dizzy margin.

 

There are moments I find myself still without ground,

twenty-eight, running in place backward.