busker

Bow down to her at Midnight

Me panicky packing, she methodical n organised.

We need a break; she produces coffee and bread and mascarpone.

From years back she produces lines I tossed off:

Do you remember that moment in
a Surrey pub? We should have talked then,
those years ago.

And the time, about then, we shared
a bedroom but not the bed
at the end of a garden at the end of
a party at the end of an era

We should have spent all night talking then,
lying in the bed we never shared, afterwards,
warm and sticky and smoking a cigarette.

Talking at the wrong time has been our silence
or, rather, not not talking when there was still time:
when a possibility of action
and a hundred small decisions
could have made a kind of revelation.

She speaks them so simply, recalls them with such honesty. I'm reminded ...

I tell her: You've not met Richard.

You must read him.