Invoice
        for R.

We were too young to imagine regret,
believing our lives a series of scenes
written by us, with no ending, no debt

to repay for the way we lived, the sweat
never cooling, the sky a constant between.
We were too young to believe in regret,

though we lived in the dust-worn sublets
of a city that coughed and staggered, unclean,
toward the train. Oblivious to how the debt

of time can annul a dream, while the violet
winter light touched the tangled sheen
we made together—too pale and lean to regret

the silence we idealized, the faint alphabet
of our breathing unable to replace, it seems,
the words we didn't say or write. There's a debt

in the light that surrounds your silhouette,
an unfolding of what I could not have foreseen.
Why didn't I stay? I was young. I didn't know regret
grew with time, with memory—an indelible debt.

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Copyright © 2022 Danielle Cadena Deulen All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission