Saturday Night With Rachel Somewhere Else

Oh Rachel, My Sylvaine,
My Only Beloved Rachel,
Your name sets the meter for my poetry;
And I set aside my Saturday nights
To be without you,
To be intensely without you.

Oh Rachel, all other times you are
In my mind and in my heart,
Because thoughts of you will be there
And I can do nothing but submit
With the love which makes my mind so
Hospitable a home for thoughts of you.

But Saturday nights - all alone and yet
At my most sociable! - I have to write you,
Either in my notebook, or on this screen,
Or on scraps meant for burning.
When you came to call me back from death,
I saw I liked you, but I did not suspect
The Love to come. When I first realized
I loved you, I felt no urgency. It was a crush,
Surely it would go away. But then I realized
Soon you would go away, and I panicked
Into the most desperate love,
The love where I still live now.

Could I live without you?
Truly I did not know.
Truly I do not know now.

I wrote over and over in my notebook,
Don't tell Leah
Don't tell Rachel
Don't tell your family
Don't tell your sister
Tell this notebook.

Write! I wrote. Writing has been the way
For me to keep to myself all the thoughts
Which must be stored in secrecy.
Yes, I write to not be read, and yet if only ....

But it will never be:
Lucky I guess, and so
Saturday Nights I write.