Reunion: J-School, Class of 19--

Cutlery clatters into the sink.

But always the characters, uniquely themselves,

only some decades older. They search

for their coats. You were, she reminds him,

our resident nomad, come to pitch your tent

here, sidewalks for sand, unaccustomed taboos:

Morningside Heights, one of your lives.

                                        Thirty years

since the awkward goodbye? Before he goes—

East Africa his beat, Germany hers—he’ll

visit the nephew, the namesake in Boston

who drives a cab, sends a pittance each month

to a wellhead in—we’ll call it Sudan.

He explains how it works, this drip feed

of cash to Sudan from the United States:

cheap, fast. She’s not clear about this—he jots

her a website: it’s a place she can go.

So they won’t meet again...suddenly

Can you forgive me? he blurts—

a classmate’s apartment, Upper West Side,

the grown child’s room, bears

in tidy shrines, scrum of sloughed coats.

In the kitchen friends wash up. Sound

of laughter. Sound of water flowing

out of a tap. Yes, she replies, shocked

by the twinge, then ache, of remorse.

She “forgot”? And him—thirty years—

the place still hurts? It’s myself I can’t forgive,

she knows later. Right now, vague shame.

End of March. Maybe April. Street trees

are trying to bloom. The irretrievable

sits on the table, white as a plate. He holds her

her coat.