Duluth

Driving through Duluth,

            turning up the radio, singing

            “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”

            and I’m thinking about sex, and you –

    -- but not sex with you –

I say, “The next time I fall in love,

I want it to be in Duluth,”

    but I know, and  she knows,

    that we don’t need a man

            to fall in love tonight—

and come to think of it, he’d

only get in the way,

of two college Goddesses driving over the bridge to Wisconsin.

She switches the radio to the Indigo Girls, Galileo,

and you fly out the window

as she smiles, her fingers winking

on my leg.

“I think I’ll write a book.”

Between us hangs China, graduation, job searches,

            what it means to be in love.

Ahead of us, slushy roads, warm beds, papers to write, degrees to earn.

            Beside us, the cop who pulled us over,

            “just to see if we’re cute,” we know,

            but he pretends the problem is the headlight.

Behind us,

            the lights of Duluth.

                        --February 5, 2002