Outside, the dark gnaws our seats
though a citronella’s light outlines
your face. Over wine, you tell me
you don’t miss her and I’d hear you if
I didn’t recall other nights like this.
At cocktail parties, where your eyes
worked past me in dim bars of light,
to search for some sliver
of her smile against the crowd.
Or the nights she wasn’t there—
how you looked for her
in the soft down of your pillow, or
in the noisy toss of winter wind
and summer shade—hell, any place
that wasn’t my outstretched arms.
Seriously, you tell me, it’s done,
and yes, I’d hear you
but I can’t seem to shake
my urge to press this mosquito
into the candle, to feel the wax give in,
to hear it, buzzing, drown.
You’ve definitely worked on clarifying exactly what’s happening in this piece, and reworked on the confusing verb tense shift. The language does not overpower the narrative, like it did before. I think you’ve brought back into that middle area. I know I shouldn’t bring outside information into this…but I am. You told me before that the speaker and the man are not lovers or dating, but I still get that feeling from this draft. I don’t understand why he would be convincing the speaker that he’s over this other woman, if he and the speaker were not together. I think if you want to keep that then you need to clarify who the speaker is to this man. Also, you may want to italicize the “Seriously, you tell me, it’s done” bit because I had to read that line a few times to figure out that the “seriously” part was the other person and not the speaker. Sometimes when I copy my drafts onto blogger, it will separate the last line and that happened here, so you should know that the last tercet actually looks like a couplet and then a line all by its lonesome.
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