We’d met this last time to decide
which memory to burn first. You suggested
the pigeons of Trafalgar Square; I countered
with the baboons at the Prospect Park Zoo.
After wine, we took cracks at revising
our origin story: We invented a war
in which we shared a chocolate bar in Istanbul;
we were diplomats; gunrunners; indignant reporters,
our knife-whittled pencils of righteousness. 
We started, in point of fact,
at a gas station in Louisiana. You said:
“There’s nothing about you
that scares me.” Later, I was stupid, etc.;
the words in my mouth kept leaking out
in colors neither of us recognized.
Trafalgar, in point of fact, no longer exists.
And baboons, the experts now admit,
are merely robots with dirty tails.
At the real end of us, my tugboat
pulled its miserly load along the river.
The beer can on the buoy was a flag;
the shoreline, absent of gulls,
rainbowed its oily sands.
You wore at least the shawl I loved —
and when you jumped from the pier,
the fog remained and I did not linger.