And you have long since outlived
the scene where he buried
his Swiss Army knife in the planting box outside the courthouse
to avoid setting off alarms—as if you two
hadn’t already created
alarms enough, hadn’t sufficiently frightened
and injured each other, which is why
you found yourselves in a courtroom.
And that was
so many years ago, you can now observe
those figures dispassionately, or even
with pity: they are characters
in a novel you’re tempted to cast aside, the story
is so worn, the people callow and self-absorbed:
you aren’t inclined, at first, to forgive them
for being as young, as ignorant
as you were then.
Place the woman instead
on a ledge of schist in a city park.
Etch wrinkles around her eyes, her mouth.
The rock is five hundred million years old.
And she, past seventy, wears
an old purple, Indian cotton dress,
a little frayed, which almost rhymes
with the fractured schist. A glacier, melting,
has left her there. She has survived
her own violence. She may even begin
to tell a story.
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