How Far Away We Are
by Ada Limón
So we might understand each other better:
I’m leaning on the cracked white window ledge
in my nice pink slippers lined with fake pink fur.
The Air Conditioning is sensational. Outside,
we’ve put up a cheap picnic table beaneath the maple
but the sun’s to hot to sit in, so the table glows
on alone like bleached-out bones in the heat.
Yesterday, so many dead in Norway. Today,
a big-voiced singer found dead in her London flat.
And this country’s gone standstill and criminal.
I want to give you something, or I want to take
something from you. But I want to feel the exchange,
the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out
and the ear holding on to it. Maybe we could meet
at that table under the tree, just right out there.
I’m passing the idea on to you in this note:
the table, the tree, the pure heat of late July.
We could be in that same safe place watching
the sugar maple throw down its winged seeds
like the tree wants to give us something too–
some sweet goodness that’s so hard to take.