Interlude (Poetry)

There was one telling chapter in my teens —
brief, I think, and like a passive dream.
I held a true affection for another girl
more real than friendship — something close to love
gentle with its ache to be romantic — out of focus — undefined.

In truth, she was no beauty, being angular and tall
her sculpted bell of hair a smooth mid-brown
her face a freckled heart, blue eyes fractionally too small
she had an artist’s hands — long-fingered and, if I recall
almost elegantly-proportioned dancer’s feet.

She was well-above-average clever — not the show-off kind
one of those who craved attention — a noisy extrovert
but quietly so, as though her many talents were
a secret just between the two of us. Better far
that no one else should notice her.

We spent some private time together — shared the sort
of girlish confidences in the way perhaps some sisters do.
She, like me, an only child and more used to being insular
self-sufficiency an armour for the sensitive —
we often flinched in unison.

If we ever, on occasion, touched I don’t remember it.
All messages were surely passed some subtle way
for we never spoke of understandings — never promised
or demanded anything of one another. Whatever we had
back then it’s now impossible to say.

Then break up. Nothing dramatic — just the longed-for end of
school.
Thus we were parted and I’ve never seen her since —
no glimpse in all these greying varied-fortune years
and when I think of her — call up what images
an aging brain can muster from its depths
I find them grainy — just a clutch of snapshots left
in memory’s back drawer ... And yet
I feel a tug that opens more and more
wistful thoughts nostalgia filed away...

*

I’ve missed our rare connection — as fleeting as it was
its tender echoes make me wonder still
how I loved her so entirely without question then
while some part of me admits I always will.