I am on a lakeside bench in a cold night. She drapes her legs over mine. I recite embarassing excerpts from a self-unaware journal, but the story is known to us both. She kisses me, I think, or I her, or perhaps not for one more day. Soon we will wake to trumpets, and soon alone.



It won't be so, she says. But the poem might be anyway written, if I so wish it. I do, so it is. And it becomes so. She's tearily in my doorway now. It takes some years to throw away her empty perfume bottle, but I manage it.



I am in a castle, of sorts. She bursts into the room with penned words we had been too afraid to say aloud. Words which had long outgrown their teenage frivolity and matured into paralysis. But I'm even older now. How could I ever say them again?