Romance

I went back, as to my relatives. When I arrived, the elms had been shaved. But you were all the same. The buildings, the dry classrooms. I embraced your eyes, your avenues. You were fixed in the same expressions. Your flat voices, your dental work, like your lips, slipping over words already said. Additional agricultural pamphlets; many of you sat in private offices. Why did I think I could drag it all back, the former edge of town where streets ended in fields under clouds puffed like the French phrases he kissed me with in the sucked-in breath of that illusive happiness. Coming back, listening, looking; ready to take your bodies in my hands. Returning to streets that had poured heavy shopping malls over the hay-sweet grass where he and I lay whispering the most important nonsense of my desperate and embittered life.