Robert Estes

One Word Missing

Jim the poet
couldn’t get over it,
even told me about
how, when the woman
he desperately craved
was leaving with others
who’d been in his room
in the old house that
he shared with similars,
he’d said just to her
with intense feeling
(adding her name I’ve forgotten)
“Will you come back…?”
“You know I will,” she’d replied.
He meant that night
after she’d parted
from the others
to come back and be with him
for the night.
He was a pretty good poet
and assumed too much
understanding of his words.
It was obvious to me
from the way she’d worded
her reply that she
must have meant
again sometime,
not that night,
hadn’t understood
probably.
I didn’t even try to explain,
just sort of shook my head
in a false show of sympathy.
He couldn’t get over it.
“You know I will.”
Better to puzzle about it
as almost a betrayal,
incomprehensible,
even cruel,
than to see it was
a mere misread
his hope had failed to catch.

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Robert Estes, whose roots are in Texas, has by now lived more than half his life in the Boston area. He got his PhD in Physics at UC Berkeley and had some interesting times using physics, notably on a couple of US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. Since then, 30-odd of his poems have appeared in 20-odd publications, including Gargoyle, Cola Literary Review, The Moth, the museum of americana, Masque & Spectacle, Heimat Review, Constellations, Sierra Nevada Review, and the anthology Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Film. 

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