Without coffee,
my morning is
terrible,
has become my cliche.
To believe her bridge too classical,
she insisted I should know . . .
What was it that I should know
about her,
through her, not her,
She becomes me
in my mind––
I should look at the pictures
painted on Greek vases,
She suggested,
having said that one of her teachers
had said,
and so then
what should I?
The question is to do or not to make
the eye knows
what it sees,
I wonder?
We pause to look
at a variety of vases
among the collection
of Greek pottery
at the Met.
She and I walking together
apart,
her profile too classical,
I thought about how
I was supposed to
say I imagined
her having
said to herself
she said that no one
she knows
has her nose,
the line of her profile . . .
beautiful I knew
I saw I thought later,
seeing her seeing
me, I watched her
obliquely, the mirror
has become
motifs falling headlong
into her eyes
waiting
for her to arrive having taken
our table
in the corner,
on the banquet . . .
the mirrors at right angles
above us sitting
side-by-side,
not across from one another
as all the solipsists
in the room do . . .
something smaller this time,
I imagine holding her
hand playing as we play,
hand in hand,
a stone, into the waves,
I re-collect,
another pebble
I put in my pocket,
what would it mean to be-go,
wverything between . . .
what it says
to be-gone,
to be-come,
to be-have.
The Falling Leaf Review 