He had not recognised me or I him.
The place was crammed and rackety, and our eyes
Took each other in, and we didn’t realise…
We stared, and we ruled each other out until
After several glassy seconds I found the will
And the nerve to speak. Well — it must be! — He knows my name.
In the warmth that dropped on me after the ice-cold air,
I’d been looking for someone I knew, to launch a greeting
Eagerly after long decades of never meeting.
In a crowd of loud unknowns I would still have said
I might tell this man from the back of his schoolboy head,
And a sureness that the same face would still be there.
But whereas I’d kept down to a coating of grey
Hairs the strictures of time, he must have chosen
At some one point to cast his looks in this frozen
Fix of resolve: a magnate’s air, or the stance
Of a judge or a general offering little chance
Of mercy or pardon to anyone in his way.
I couldn’t say what experience — what disease? —
Might have changed his features to this curious form,
Maintaining them thus right up to the present time.
We had grown apart without ever dreaming that so
Much change would occur in us, and we’d just not know…
But there it was, in a shoal of differences.
And why hadn’t we talked this through? We didn’t doubt
It was too late to try now. We could only give
Cold acknowledgment to each other and try to live
In the next hours through the masks we had settled for.
So we stood and accepted that. We knew the score,
Like everyone else lost for things to talk about.
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