The Girl I Never Met and Didn’t Marry

Today I saw the girl I never met and didn’t marry.
Pretty, slim and twenty-two, she sat there at a yellow
table on a yellow chair upon a verdant new June lawn,

her eyes direct and candid, soaking up the sight of me
from underneath a giant curving picture hat. She wore
a pinky-orange summer dress. Me, I was a mess.

Stood there like a sagging barn, sweaty large black
t-shirt on, stained as badly as my past – cargo shorts
hung baggy from my sixty-year old ass: feet in clunky

sneaks – at all of which she took quite thorough peeks.
She neither seemed distressed, impressed nor more
than mildly curious about the marriage that we never had.

I didn’t have to say that I was gay – she didn’t have to tell
me what she’d done instead of wedding me – perhaps
we wondered what a child from both of us might have

turned out to be, but mostly we accepted we were
ghosts. Funny, though, the glow of that unblinking gaze.
That’s the part of her, this girl I never met, that stays.


 
 
 
 
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