Love Poem from #14

Since I moved in, you’ve taught me
how to shuffle across the boards
like old men or ghosts,
pointing out that our floor
is someone else’s ceiling.
We keep the volume turned low
when watching films about war
or families falling apart
so everything sounds far away,
as if it were coming from down the hall
or upstairs, or next door;
as if our neighbors were all
in a state of passionate disarray.
Meanwhile, when we make love
in #14 on the fourth floor
one of us has to have a hand
or a foot on the headboard
to keep it from knocking the wall.
You would almost think we’re squatters
hiding out in someone else’s life,
playing at being adults—
but quietly so we don’t get caught.
The trick is to subtract from one’s presence
until it seems you’re hardly there at all,
as if this box of brick and plaster
held only the intimation of existence:
the furnishings, without the rages or the laughter.
But in spite of your discretion
when you do laugh that high
bright sound threatens
to bring down the whole place.

Nicholas Spengler is a writer and teacher from Burlington, Vermont, currently based in London. He has written literary biographies of Herman Melville and Mohawk poet Maurice Kenny for Scribner’s American Writersseries, and his poems have appeared in The Salon: A Journal of Poetry & Fiction and The Café Review. His first book of poems, Your Voice in Half-Light, was published in 2013 by Honeybee Press.