A Life in the Theater

I was wrong,
I shouldn’t have picked up the phone

just to read you the line
you already knew from the review

the reviewer wrote that said you were no good
in the play I can’t remember

and only came to see because it was you
alive somewhere else in it—shining below the fake sun

and I was in love with something
you said or thought or willed into being

because of just being back in the boat with the living
after swimming too far out and for so long just

to meet living again. I struggled to get on board
and join the vessel of time.

I tried to love a man outside the theater
of men who left some other men and found them again.