I am a one-time listener. I live in the country by a river; but I drive to town to have coffee with my clients, women, in small restaurants with windows looking out onto back streets, between two and four in the afternoon, rain, if possible, and an open door under an awning, faded, green, and tan. The two of us are sometimes visible in a mirror.
The women are often hurt, no longer waiting, or filled with waiting, but often geniuses chronicling a single spot and moment. Natural light around us, we are always more than halfway together, and I am changed, always, by a word, or two, at the edge, like an artist’s signature.
In a restaurant by the water, yesterday, I talked with someone breaking apart, like a frozen sea. We began concerned with coffee and refills, keeping appropriate distance between ourselves. She held the cup in two hands, staring across the street at a curb where a few sparrows hopped, as if that were her whole life.
She said, “We had circled for many days, edging slowly inward, always wanting not to lose anything. Then with a fifth of gin we became a woman and a man talking. We stayed up late, out of bed. We set the wedding rings on the table, to make room. The spell of the ordinary had to be broken.
We talked about the back seat of an old Impala, a drugstore parking lot and other talks over the years abandoned before diminishment or understanding. We did damage to each other, arriving first at words as shiny as pewter, out of habit, but this time not stopping there. We made trips to the refrigerator for ice and fruit. Our meanings came in big chunks, and still we withheld things.
From the avenue outside, a sense of the apartment existing in the right place and time came in through the windows. Something was paying attention, as if copying the lives we spoke in night calligraphy, dark on dark. We came out of the half-seen, sharing only the distance remaining to know the whole terrain.
There were admissions, revengeful, ornamental, barricades of guilt, room after room found to be structured of empty gestures that took place near enough to kindness to want to keep as space. We were spent; and by break of day, alone. But challenging myself, that felt like theft of my life, a surge of intention beyond control was necessary, was cause. I’m sure we were held together then by what will come to be years in the future.”
She mentioned that she and her husband were leaving within a few weeks for an extended stay in Toledo, Spain and I wished them well. I said perhaps sorrow will not repeat itself, even in two sparrows flying through El Greco’s clouds. Our contract stipulated that we would not speak again.
Robert Morrison Randolph has published five books of poetry and nearly 50 individual poems. He has been a teaching Fulbright scholar in Finland and Greece. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and their black dog, Ella.
