First Date on a Blue Moon

Home from our movie and drinks and flying high
I made the exciting mistake of having another glass
of wine, so now, as I try to type, my fingertips 
keep sliding across these keypads and into 
the narrow valleys between them. The sensations 
as my fingers recover from this remind me how it felt, 
earlier tonight, when you began to pull out of our hug,  

my hands not letting go a few seconds too long,
my fingers pressing down into the shallow spaces
they’d just found between the jointed bones
of your back, sheathed in your shirt bleached white 
by the blue moon. And it felt as if the moon, 
now set, had shown me how to take that liberty, 
not common among men new to each other.  

Set, but somewhere else still bright, like the face 
of this screen, and seeming from that place 
to be guiding me toward the right words here, 
an unlikely prospect I can’t rule out but if sober 
probably would, given how many slips of the tongue 
the machine I’m the heart of has made, how long 
it’s taken to say, with such a clumsy touch: 

Any world that doesn’t have as its point 
My being with you again, that’s not my world.

First published, in an earlier version, in The Hopkins Review