Aubade for a Long Ago January

Robert Allen

March 8, 2022

The blades of grass between her place and my car

might have been frosted with dew the way they shone

in the early morning’s two or three streetlights.

I may have turned to see the tracks of my shoes.

Maybe I looked only for my white Maverick.

The highway to home was empty but the words

she whispered in my ear filled the night with dreams,

a kind of hushed excitement for a secret

I found hard to keep. When I got to my bed

there would be no more than an hour or two left

before I had to rise for church and meet with

a friendship class we called the Swinging Singles.

Divorced, two kids, at worst a cradle-robber,

she believed I was the answer to her prayers.

Remembering her words still makes my head spin.

What I recall with certainty is backing

out of the garage on the morning after,

swinging around blind with sleep and forgetting

where my brother’s big Suburban had been parked,

then the sound as my rear bumper smashed the red

plastic of his taillight, that fearful moment

of my future unraveling, and those ruby

shards blazing from the ground as I sped away

to a daylight when sweet words couldn’t fool me.

Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Writers Take a Walk, and Poetry on the Move. He co-facilitates Gemini Ink's Open Writer's Lab.