Pause, On the corner of Kings’ and 23rd North West and smile, let your face crumble like a cookie dipped in spring milk.
Tell her the musky scent of her perfume reminds you of spring wafting in on the wind heady, yet subtle, hardly felt.
Moan about the weather, of snow pelting down like hail of sunshine shoved into a corner by clouds and then nightfall
When you find she’s clutching Chaucer to her chest and McEwan in her bag, read her a line from Komunyakaa: ‘I took seven roads to get here and almost died three times’*.
But if her fingers linger or tap dance on her phone disappear- because sometimes the nostalgia of an unsoiled memory is worth more than the pain of paradise lost.
– \* Borrowed from one of my favourite Komunyakaa poems, ‘ Providence’; from the Pleasure Dome anthology.