Rendezvous

Outside Filene’s, Mall of New Hampshire,

late November, you pull up to the curb

in a maroon Mercury with New York plates.

You are dressed entirely in black.

As we embrace, I feel you gather substance

as if coming back to yourself,

until being in my own bones and blood

become real to me.

Our words rush over each other greedily,

and yet we are loathe to spend them.

We select from the richness

of all we didn’t know we had to say

until the other came to hear it.

I know what it is to live

in a place that starves you slowly

until you wonder if you still exist behind

the life you carry on.

We both know how the weight

of your art can be the anchor,

that holds you to this world.

Our 90 minutes evaporate like the vapor in our breath,

and you return me to Filenes’s curb,

and while the motor on your rental car still runs, and

under a full moon, of course, with my hand on the door latch,

you tell me you have loved me from the first instant

and through 25 years of moments since.

Some truth is invaluable, some just painful—

I’m not sure about this one.

I watch you pull away;

your taillights bleed

into the enveloping darkness.