Ocarina

The young Welsh woman waiting

for the same train delayed on its way

to Frankfurt-am-Main was right

to be suspicious. Who was I

after all? A man, twice her age,

unmediated by a screen. 

The accent helps: guileless, naive 

American abroad. She loved 

Luxembourg and Sevilla and kept fingering

her face, which wasn’t going to help

heal whatever was festering there. 

There was a flicker of interest 

over politics, but it didn’t really click 

until we got to games (where we’d

been, in a sense, all along).

Who would’ve thought that the worlds 

I worked through in middle school 

would reappear here on the platform? 

An ocarina playing through time.

It was all a good reminder: the main 

reason to talk to pretty people

is the same reason you do 

anything else: to reassure yourself 

that the grapes, forever receding 

from reach, would--attained--

have been sour anyway.