Taking for...

A stranger wearing jeans and a sweatshirt walks toward me under the viaduct.  
Another stranger shoots heroin in his arm while sitting on shaggy littered grass near the concrete sidewalk.  
Cars pass. It is raining.  
The approaching stranger carries a white paper cup with a brown plastic lid. I assume it contains  hot coffee.  And I think of a…
simple joy, as joy will be. The softness of it, like mist. Loving that was knowing, loving rolling into a body more familiar than my own, unassumingly as easy as brushing my teeth.

He would leave our bed, my eyes dancing over his body, happy knowing he knew how to touch me.

Downstairs into the cold early morning he went to the kitchen,
to the street by the hotel where red rocks cast shadows,
to his car covered in snow, to drive to Starbucks,
wherever he needed to go to get the coffee I liked best.

I used to believe in more love and more time.  

Wrinkled in overpasses now, I imagine the approaching stranger is taking coffee to his lover.
I pass him and the junkie and in my hand,
I clutch and conjugate “to grant.”