“…Pessoaic, ” he said
and my heart fluttered.
~
He had paused first, focusing me,
and I had yielded – accustomed to
lingering in his pauses, teetering on
the edge of acute awareness and
feeling the anticipation ripen
within me. When he spoke again,
it was in our language; the image
spinning already in and through
a shared conscious. A poet-in-pieces,
knelt before the open trunk, pulling
pages between them and arguing
intellectual copyright – each insistently
pleading on behalf of their subject,
their emotions, their truth, as the
rain began to fall from the darkening
sky outside. I would gently correct,
redirect – flinging the conversation
onto another path – my eyes lifting
as I did from the paper between us
to the poet before me and in
the sultry air of a dimly lit room
that we never once occupied, against
the backdropp of a lone streetlamp
and too many raindrops to count,
his eyes, and heart, met mine.
Christine Austin Cole
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/an-evening-in-portugal/
