Michael Estabrook

 

Any Other Way

The rain plinks mercilessly
against the bedroom windows.
I hope she isn't getting all wet
sleeping out there in that tent,
camping with her friends
in the Cape Cod dunes.
I hope she isn't
getting chilled to the bone
when the sun goes down
and the winds whip in off
the mercilessly churning ocean.
"I missed you today,"
she says to me on the phone,
lying alone on her air mattress
in her tent. I respond,
"I wish I were lying next to you right now."
But she doesn't hear me.
"If you were here," she says,
I know you would've walked my bike
up the hills for me today
and I wouldn't have to be so tired."
"Of course I would have," I say,
then think back all those years
ago to high school, to that time
when she sprained a tendon in her leg,
in her precious beautiful leg,
and couldn't walk and I gallantly
carried her from room to room
in her house. Yes, I have been there
for her a long long time and wouldn't
have wanted it any other way.

CP

Michael Estabrook has published chapbooks and appeared in various magazines through the years, but he is still searching for that perfect poem. Right now he is looking for it in his wife and says if it's anywhere, that's where it will be.