Who knows why
We choose one and not another;
Why what we do
In a precise second in the whole of eternity
Should shape our life’s destiny?
I was with a girl
With long, deep chestnut-colored hair
Beside a river.
We hadn’t known each other long or much,
but for a few minutes, we were alone together one summer evening.
She seemed to me
that she could be
my future.
She epitomized Life for me – artistic, kind, beautiful, naive –
She made me feel
For a second
Like a god, looking at me, wondering at me, waiting for me, as if I was her entire world.
I knew in that second I meant something to her.
And yet, in that second I also knew I’d lost her.
I was no god.
If the whole of eternity could be condensed into one second
This was that moment.
I may have read too much into her look
But I don’t think so.
If I had considered more I should have asked her out
But instead, I said something mundane or inconsequential.
It must have disappointed her.
We said goodbye and she turned away
And I never saw her again.
But I wondered too, many times,
And looked at her intriguing signature, underlined with a Celtic knot,
On a postcard, she had lovingly written.
I was in no position
to choose a wife,
nor she a husband,
but girlfriend and boyfriend was a real possibility.
A more considered response
may have changed my life, but I let that second go.
I can see that second now,
Cutting through the years,
back to that moment
Since I stood with her, our lives before us, besides a river;
and we were both too young.