Love, separation, and Billy Collins

[ursula]

“thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
while he gazed at one moon and she another.”
Billy Collins “The four moon planet”

I need a book as a companion.

I want words to act as a warm and solid
chest to rest my head upon,
someone’s thoughts to feel safe with,
pages reflecting a beautiful, gentle, and
thoughtful mind of sensitivities.

I read Billy Collins’s “Ballistics”.

My mind is alive with conflict,
confused by my loves and scared
by my own proposal of separation.
I see no resolution between the one
I married who offers me loyalty, but
who I only now view as a friend, and
the one who fills me with passion, the
one I feel I can truly make love too, but
who also enjoys someone else.

So I turn to Billy to offer me respite,
who steadies my mind as I search
for the path of least harm, only to find
that a new bereavement awaits me:
for what will I do, when I’ve read the
last poem of this his latest collection?