The Land of What If

Though it comes across as absent-mindedness,
the heart is at stake:
an affair that came between them
two decades back, a job offer not taken
in a distant, exciting city, a loved son
dead at twenty.

`Don't go there' consoling friends said,
`That's all in the past,
water under the bridge.' But nothing
leaves without trace. He catches himself in a sigh;
she, brushing white hair, thinks what she might have been
in another country.

So they did go there, became permanent residents,
invalids lost for words in the land of what if.


Silences
for Edward Hopper

How you would have loved
...