I said, Let’s go for a ride. I have something to tell you.

But he said, I can’t. I am going to the airport.

Where?

He said, I have to go.

I was so surprised I could not speak.

He said, Do not be angry. I will write soon.

The subharmonics of lies.

I said, Write? I don’t want paper.

Please, he said. He put his arms around me. From the first time he had warned me.

His hair fell over his left eye.

He said, I have to memorize your face. I want you to remember how I almost died for you on my last night in Paris.

Ta gueule, I said.

He liked my bad language and I was studying his rueful smile and he said, I have to go before I change my mind. I cannot stay here. I don’t want to hurt you. I do not love as you do.

And then he let me go.

The rude severing, never, never again trust the body’s desire.

He walked down the steps…being…of your own…light…the astonishing…and I thought, What am I going to do now? And he disappeared through the door.

I looked into the empty space where he had been. I thought, I will love you even to death, even while my ashes are being tossed into the wind and there is nothing left of me, still I will love you.

I sat on the floor with a book that I did not read and when I went downstairs a little later, George was sitting out front smoking, his birdcage on the sidewalk beside him. He tipped the silver case in which he kept his hand-rolled cigarettes toward me and I took one and sat down beside him. The budgies were making a racket.

What’s wrong with them? I asked. The soothing nicotine. The wretched flavour. The irritating birds.

There is a new one in there, he said. They’re claiming their territory, I imagine.

Tsssssk. Tssssssk.

Small territory, I said.

Always is, said George.

We watched them and watched the darkness over Notre-Dame.

He left, I said.

Who?

You know, Kosmos. Didn’t you see him?

I don’t keep track of the tumbleweeds, said George. Where did he go?

He would not say.

Your Ottoman lover, said George.

I might die, I said.

George rubbed the end of his cigarette between his fingers.

Love’s not Time’s fool, he said, Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.

That’s no answer, I said.

Poetry is always an answer, said George.

—

I wrote letters to Mam about working in the shop and about Shakespeare’s and I sent her the short pieces I was mailing to Canadian Forum, Notes from a Flaneuse in Paris, though I did not attach much importance to them. Mam’s letters described the garden and the election and what she was reading. The night she got her glider licence she wrote on the outside of the envelope, Celebrate! Loneliness seeped through her familiar large-looped handwriting. I pictured her sitting at the kitchen table with her writing box open, choosing a card and lifting her pen. She wrote that now she was going to train to fly cross-country. She described the sensation of a hot thermal, the rushing sound and rising in the air. In another letter she wrote that she wanted soon to sell the old family house and move somewhere else and at the very end of the page she wrote that a man had asked her on a date. She ran out of paper so she turned the page sideways and wrote up the margins and around the top as if writing sideways was a better way to tell certain stories. It is flattering, she wrote, but my word, he just wants to sit around—our first date we went to a movie and the next time he wanted to come to my house to dinner—I don’t want to take care of any more men—or anyone—the garden is almost done now—I’m drying mint this year—love, Mam. And she put a mint leaf in the envelope.