Untitled
You asked if ever I consider lovers from the past,
imagining what might have been?
Memory leaps to one romantic rainy Friday night
more spring than winter half a life ago.
Born a taxi driver's daughter,
well acquainted with the backseat of a cab,
I knew my way around the pungent air
of leather and tobacco.
Daddy said it more than once,
the hack's best friend is airport fare and
two for one is kindred to a small inheritance.
A pick-up dispatch crackled on the two-way radio,
And, no, I told my driver,
I did not object to second passenger,
or attendant race against the traffic
for the last departing New York shuttle.
He was handsome in the way
of sanguine artists postured on the brink of fame.
A concert violinist
whose hands could find their way
around a fingerboard in any circumstance.
Drizzle turned to downpour slowing traffic to a tourist pace.
Raindrops prismed off the passing lamplights as
I lapsed into a reverie beside him,
musing had I known him minutes longer
I would kiss his dolche lips into oblivion.
He missed his plane, distressed.
I was impetuous,
lending money to a stranger
for hotel arrangements he was not
prepared to make.
We exchanged addresses.
I would be his guest when next
he played a Washington engagement.
He sent a check, repaying me.
His call came on a Friday afternoon,
he'd be in town on Saturday to play
the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
Would I like Mozart?
Should he leave a ticket at the box office window?
Yes! And my infatuated pulse
was pounding like a tympani.
In concert, one symphonic night,
I was a stradivarius
played by passion's master violinist.
There were encores.
You have asked, "What might have been?"
I smile and say, "It does not matter."
Copyright © Stazja McFayden 1999