From My Notebook, 1977, London

The girl in gray by the bank of telephones,

shuffled from foot to foot, chilly although indoors.

Two darker girls waited for calls, smoking,

and a redhead wept because

she couldn’t get continuous purring, what

the Brits then call a dial-tone.

Different phrases for the same thing.

Parallel lines, not too oblique.

Tears and mascara made her face a rag doll’s,

sown together, seams showing. When she got through

then smiled, one tooth covered another in the

front of her grin.

The girl in gray was ringing her teacher about meeting.

For lunch. Innocent.

They were both in London. She was abroad. He was on leave.

“What are you doing today?” she asked him. “How about now?” he said.

So they sat among the paperbacks at Dillons.

Her first paper on Marvell’s Magnanimous Despair went unwritten. 

They talked of lovers (“No one wrote her lines in life,” he said)

(“She was beautiful and what I wanted but not what I needed” he said)  

as those who will become lovers do.

He was on leave. I was abroad.

Different phrases. Iron wedge. Tinsel wing.

The same thing.