The ticking minutes shed their sound.
Our ill-matched grammar claps like thunder
Over plates of noctilucent steam.
Strange, you were rich in a poor country
And now you are its mirror.
My catechism was the digital whim of this city.
I feasted on a diet of its most numinous scraps.
It seems neither one of us has obeyed
The edicts of arranged existence.
Earlier tonight I walked here with you,
Unperplexed on the perimeter of what is,
As the nimble sentences springing from your face
Revived my collection of darknesses
Strung around me like a smashed necklace of shells.
Always, this part of the city
Fills with the scent of old ghosts,
And now the tumult of new ones.
For you the undulant tomorrows seem image-laden, plaintive,
And I want to say please, be careful, but I have no right
As your hair is already stricken a little with gray.
I want to find a way to burn it into you from across the table,
Across these fine dressings of civility,
That what I have at any given moment
Is a limbo cloaking my heavy shoulders
Like a balm that soothes the phoenix.
[Noelle Kocot {1969- } 'Consolations Before an Affair, Upper West Side, from The Best American Poetry 2001]
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