When you kissed me in a cab on
the way home from the movies, it surprised me.
A married man, you have two sons.
The next day, you flew to your posting in Africa.
Let me not say your name,
Let me not think it.
Let new thoughts waft through my head
like a warm spring breeze.
Let me not think of you over
coffee in the morning,
At teatime, and later snuggled up in bed at night.
Let no such thoughts interfere with my quotidian pleasures:
dinner with friends, a good bottle of wine.
Like Voldermort, let you be he who shall not be named.
Let me forget the fun of our foreign encounters in Paris and Marseille,
where we walked along the quais. In Perpignan during a brutal
summer heat wave, we had dinner at a sympa little restaurant, cooled
off by the carefully placed fan by our kind hostess.
Let me quit obsessing like a rodent in a cage on its tiny ferris wheel, ceaselessly wound up with thoughts of you.
This is my prayer: for your name to at last
be blown out of my head by a strong north wind.
Let me toss you a goodbye kiss, say farewell and mean it.
Kim Bendheim 