Pay attention, she said.
It was bright. Wind blew
dust into my eyes. Were people walking alone
or with a lover? If two couples approached each other
on the sidewalk, who made way first? The foreign
city, heat and retching. The insistence of the lilacs. The line cooks
touching each other on the shoulder as they maneuvered
while they worked. Let’s never be like that, we used to say
about the couples around us
eating in silence.
I never understood my friends
when they were seventeen
who said what they wanted in life
was just a husband and a child.
She had stopped on the sidewalk
to touch a flower
she did not take. I never wanted that
for certain. I think they thought to have those things
meant that they’d have love.
What happened? I walked through supermarket aisles muttering,
Bonjour bonjour. I tried on raincoats. I glimpsed her
bare feet slip out from her flats
in the gap between the dressing room curtain
and the floor. Each evening we started on the couch
and ended tangled in the same
single sheet. Five years had passed.
Imagining the pain of being a mother
she said, You watch your child grow
away from you, that is the unwinding: life becoming maintenance
instead of possibility. She was turning over a decision
that had not yet been made.
Talk rap sounding from the speakers
through open storefronts. The glow from streetlights in the evening
in the trees: almost sunlight.
An earthmover stopped at a traffic light
was rolling imperceptibly forward.
What are you thinking about? It was quiet
and visceral. A black hole
swallowed a star. Silverware flashed
in the hands of the diners. I’m really just watching,
she said, and rested
the tip of a single finger of her left hand
against the glass in greeting
to one little bottle fly
resting on the window’s other side.
