That time I bought a cocktail ring
at a flea market in Maine,
you panicked afraid people would think
we were engaged.
We were engaged.
You proposed outside the haunted corn maze
among the hidden colonies of mice
and chinch bugs, the ghosts of pilgrims past.
Did you forget?
We drank all day, serial killed
five lobsters by freezing them
then plunging knives between their eyes,
drove for hours past farm stands, fields,
gawking at trees
like assholes who never left the city.
This was before the trips to Philadelphia,
the hours you spent in hospital waiting rooms
watching disaster movies on cable
about meteors hitting Manhattan,
and roving packs of wolves
laying claim to the abandoned public libraries.
Before I stood down the hall
and watched another world end with a sputter,
mechanical messengers
announcing it with a chorus
of beeps and gasps, stammers and silence.
Maybe we knew then that was the best it would get.
Both of us waking each day to the sunrise,
me sitting up in the night
listening for sounds outside the house.