Visiting the Past, Stealing Nothing Options

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Visiting the Past, Stealing Nothing


The snow fell from a Christmas card.
A Salvation Army bell followed me
halfway down the street and a child
was tugged along by a varnished
red dog. Holding a hot chocolate,
I realized suddenly that i was alone.

The chop house full of ice-burned faces,
fur mufflers tossed over tablecloths,
the air scented with burnt animal flesh.

I entered a bookstore.
The going out of business sign crooked
and hand lettered. 17 novels on the shelf,
a dozen biographies beginning to yellow.

Maps bound with an ornamental tooling
and burnished buckram. Further back,
tins of camphor and bottles of shampoo,
languorous when I tipped them over.

Large plants that seemed to grow
a centimeter as I watched. The clock
with only one hand unable to function
like a man wounded in his sex.

The last flecks of snow dripped
from my overcoat onto the carpet.

Nowhere was there recognition of poems
you wrote for me at college or the prize
you won. The trip to England where you raced
over London Bridge to a lover on the docks
or dined at the Gordon Ramsay restaurant
inside the Claridge Hotel.

The restaurant has lost its Michelin star
like the Madarin and London Assaggi
that you also favored with your unpaid bills.
Your rouged lips holding a cheroot,
oval mouth rounded like a Saturn ring
and sounding out a new lie as carefully
worded as a front page editorial
in the Sunday London Times.