I said: tomorrow let’s meet
at this corner, I can buy
you a drink and we’ll talk.
About what? you said, looking
beyond me, your eyes on the lights
of the Port Authority building and the signs
that kept trying to tell us
location. Approaching
Eighth Avenue. All the time I kept thinking
those shrimp were so good, that we ate
at that bar in the theatre district. This still is
the theatre district, again – but that was
the first flush of twenty-one, swaying
arms linked through the streets and punch-drunk
on a lack
of limits, though I poured my drink
into the ficus pot. I’ve never liked alcohol
but the shrimp that night tasted
like cliché transformations, adolescence
transcended, the self
to the fore. I always thought you
were progression, and I would be stasis
till yanked from my concrete by you, my feet ripped
from the ground. The sickening smack
that the freshly-poured sidewalk would make
as it let go my soles. But I guess you
got tired of me. You got too far ahead
and the soaring, your wing-rush
in argyle sweater, is too much
to bear. I can’t look at you now. I guess it is good then
that you didn’t show. I am too old
for musicals, at least seen alone, so I walked
down to Twenty-third Street even though
it was the wrong direction, and
on an empty stomach took the F train home.