Robley Wilson Jr.

The Opera

I regret the going back
to old places— the streets
that are made into freeways,
the plazas and airfields
named after great men who
were alive when we loved.

It is as if by stopping
our attentions to each other
we set something heartless
in motion— that you redid
the world, that I altered
its common names to hide you.

Now that you are lost to me,
I believe I never took you
to hear Rimsky-Korsakov—
you wearing your white dress
with the hot orange shapes
I called kisses-in-the-snow.