In Progress

In a green grocer's near Belsize

I bought you flowers

and brought them home

to surprise you in front of no one

and to say, I actually do 

listen to you, something

I hope you find in someone else

someday.  I suppose we were

like Steve Martin and Gilda Radner

dancing all those years ago,

between themselves nothing 

but a frozen spotlight;

all words reduced to nothing

but a gamboling comickery,

a wonderful mirror-reflection

of a each other in each other.  

I watched that small clip

and thought of you, because

the night I fell in love with you

I played jazz piano, for you, 

drunkenly, and it seemed then 

those wine keys might be enough

to make you stay.  It was true,

there was very little left

for me but fall in love with you

and I did.  Like any frozen moment,

I held onto it longer than it took to thaw,

and the irony of recognition

in the middle of winter is not lost on me.

But it was beautiful, and I hope you

you would agree on that.  I hope you

would agree to dance with me again

someday, perhaps when we are old

and unembarrassed and happier.  

But none of this is really what I had intended

so I will leave it for a while and hope

that it will come back to me

more beautifully in an hour

or a day or a lifetime and maybe by then,

we will have found out what made us so

compatible...and be OK with it.