Things I've Never Told You

We have been apart for too long,
you overseas, me here, camping in
remote northern Pennsylvania, and
how do I know it has been
too long? Because I’m
fussing with this satellite feature
on my phone. Text, wait, chase, wait, try
again, turn slowly, lift the phone,
rotate again, people must think
I’m a lunatic. Remember mailing letters
to each other? Yours always arrived
just in time to save everything,
your teenage writing naive
and tentative on small envelopes,
my name—my name!—
written with such affinity,
your loveliness always
coming through. I would see a letter
from you and immediately stop
whatever I was doing and drive
the nine hours to Troy (or want to)
just to see you, just to sneak long
kisses when your parents weren’t in
the room, just to take in your smell,
your smile.

Maybe when I return home
from these (old-growth?) forests
I will write you a letter, shuffle it
in among the mail, and you can feign
surprise at its arrival. Maybe in the letter
I can tell you something new,
something I’ve never told you before,
and I can drive around the block, arriving
home as if I’ve just driven nine hours
to see you.

Back at camp, I don’t give up
trying to divine the location
of a satellite thousands of miles
above these trees. Two old people
(old growth?) sit outside of
a small camper, surrounded
by a fence enclosing a kind of kitchen,
keeping in two dogs the size of squirrels,
a carpet spread out. They have brought
their living space with them. Why come here,
my son asks, just to lay out
a carpet? Why bring your living room?
One of their tiny dogs
barks an electric smoker’s cough
as if it has had a tracheotomy. Three
plastic flamingos stare at me
from the fence. The woman flip-flops
her way to the shower. The man tilts
his head back against the camper,
falling asleep, mouth wide open,
mosquitoes be damned.

Will we ever do such things, you
and me, sitting in one place while
the wide world rages around us?
It’s hard to imagine, though
you do like those logic puzzles,
and I could take up pipe smoking
or the care of old dogs or
finally read all those books
or perhaps tell our campsite neighbors
the best places to fish or kayak
or see elk. Which is precisely
what the neighboring man did,
before napping. He spoke slow and kind
as if there was not a single other thing
in the sky above or the earth below,
for 20 tedious minutes, but maybe
in another life this wouldn’t chafe me
as it did. Maybe, in another life,
I will learn to sit still again or
talk slowly with strangers
or not care that the sun is setting on
too many things left to do. Maybe
I can stop chasing satellites and breathe
in the oxygen these old trees
are dying to give me.

Maybe this is what I will write about
in my first letter to you, the one I will
shuffle in amongst the other mail,
the one in which I will tell you
things I’ve never told you
before.