by Maya C Popa

1.
The clipper without
sail or shroud,
a shell through which
the city gleamed
silver-blue at midweek
dusk. It was easy
to picture us returning here
in spring, strolling
the Naval College’s
orderly greens,
once site of Bella Court
built by the Duke
of Gloucester, at some
other time a hospital.
Between chestnuts
and desultory statues,
on the south bank
where the water
laps up steel,
we would have relished
the past’s peculiar
compulsions,
the ceiling painted
for the naval pensioners—
there was a world
before this one:
it moved like sun
over skin.
2.
At dinner, I showed you
pictures of New York,
like the Wilcoxes, the objects
just so at Howard’s End.
I’ll say I didn’t know it then,
not that I didn’t heed—
anything can be afforded
at the beginning.
You were a principle
of forfeiture;
I see that now, a hope
made void by prior hope.
A skeleton ship,
and London lit up
through it, the horizon
at capacity already,
suffused with an easy
absence of you,
stretched pale and
indifferent and new.
MAYA C POPA is a writer, editor, and teacher based in NYC. She is not related to Vasko Popa.
Art by Cleo Scott
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