Susan Browne

You're telling that story again about your childhood, when you were five years old and rode your blue bicycle from Copenhagen to Espergaerde, and it was night and snowing by the time you arrived, and your grandparents were so relieved to see you, because all day no one knew where you were, you had vanished. We sit at our patio table under a faded green umbrella, drinking wine in California's blue autumn, red stars of roses along the fence, trellising over the roof of our ramshackle garage. Too soon the wine glasses will be empty, our stories told, the house covered with pine needles the wind has shaken from the trees. Other people will live here. We will vanish like children who traveled far in the dark, stars of snow in their hair, riding to enchanted Espergaerde.

I know him, that man walking- toward me up the crowded street of the city, I have lived with him seven years now, I know his fast stride, his windy wheatfield hair, his hands thrust deep in his jacket pockets, hands that have known my body, touched its softest part, caused its quick shudders and slow releasings, I have seen his face above my face, his mouth smiling, moaning his eyes closed and opened, I have studied his eyes, the brown turning gold at the centers, I have silently watched him lying beside me in the early morning, I know his loneliness, like mine, human and sad, but different, too, his private pain and pleasure I can never enter even as he comes closer, past trees and cars, trash and flowers, steam rising from the manhole covers, gutters running with rain, he lifts his head, he sees me, we are strangers again, and a rending music of desire and loss— I don’t know him—courses through me, and we kiss and say,It’s good to see you, as if we haven’t seen each other in years when it was just a few hours ago, and we are shy, then, not knowing what to say next.