Silver Bell

As long as it’s still possible to say I love you to one person while— as if right in front of that person— fucking someone else in a way that, if it doesn’t look like love, exactly,

at least resembles, for a time, commitment, I refuse to commit, he said. Why were we talking about this, or even talking at all, me and this stranger whom,

in better light, or more of it, I might’ve kept looking right past: up to where the thunderclouds (but without the thunder) had begun clambering over the mountains like

sluggish bears just done wintering, or down, to the view beneath us— a ock, or part of one, of wild turkeys hunting for anything useful left in a wilderness I

used to call the lawn, once, when I believed in lawns, back when su ering still seemed a thing worth singing about. Why not call it love— each gesture—if it does love’s work?