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{old boyfriends} lyn lifshin The deaf ones leave a note in the house you don’t still wait for him in, unable to call. “For old times’ sake,” he writes. Or was it a blow job? Others send postcards from Miami, they’ve said the same thing 16 years. Suddenly they stop. Your present boyfriend’s daughter was 7 when the post cards came. Now she’s wanting a baby. Most, you never hear from again. It’s a jolt to read their obituary, especially if you left them. Almost a relief with the ones you cared for too much. No old boyfriends have called me for dinner or brunch. Once I could count them, the lovers, at least waiting hours in an airport with nothing to do. They are probably on a list in a poetry notebook in some archives. I remember my cats, from 6 years old more clearly. Of course there weren’t as many. Old boyfriends come back in dreams and when I wake up I’m not sorry. One writes poems about a woman in clothes like mine who looks like me. Hardly any have asked for money or good wishes on a marriage. The ones, never quite lovers, haunt the most like a book you couldn’t put down but never finished, left behind in some abandoned railroad station you won’t get back to again |
