Closure
I’m proud of the annoying way –
running into someone
I haven’t seen for thirty years – I start
talking as if we’d talked yesterday.
If he remarks on this, I say
it shows my contempt
for Time, which withdraws
data before I can draw
conclusions. And whether or not
he says it aloud, he thinks *He hasn’t changed*,
and for a moment
feels how much poorer his life was
without me. I meanwhile
judge that despite his joy he will not
offer me an editorship,
an interview, a chalet
in Aspen, money, his wife, or dinner.
At most he’ll want to send me his grandchildren’s
poems. He looks
away, as if for the secret
police who appear
when one acts out of character, and asks
if I’m still religious. No,
I say, I got tired
of shoveling my best moods
through a hole in the sky. Well, what about
my Marxist phase? I surprise
us with a class analysis
of this moment that is so precise
it belongs in a museum. And suddenly
I think of Gide:
how all France once hung
on whether he would take
the road to Rome or to Moscow …
Forgotten now, a great name in his day.
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