You Who Arrived Late
After Rilke’s ‘You Who Never Arrived’
If I could compress Fifth Avenue
across all time—all the visitors of The Met
would fall onto each other, stacked like leaves
in fall—turn it into a flipbook without time,
where you’d look up at me and smile,
people fade out and we’d meet,
as a new universe would stem and rapture.
Instead, you brush away a feeling
in the spring air of the nineties
and walk down the steps, while I look up
at the sky of the new millennium not knowing why
it was more than azure and continue my sketch
of the couple at the hot dog stand;
a fig tree shudders somewhere
as we fall back onto these separate futures
along the branches of our lives which never
entwined until now,
when my roots have taken knots,
and you heave firewood readied for winter
as fog fills up our offing.
*
Shama has work published in ‘The Pierian’, ‘Gyroscope Review’, and elsewhere. She writes from an old dusty corner of the earth but like Diogenes identifies as Cosmopolitan, and unlike him can be found sometimes on X @EntangledRhyme and IG @entangledrhyme.
