The tables and benches are wet.
Barges on the Rhine low their mourning.
Water stands high after the rains.
On the opposite bank, the sharp
chimneys of the steelworks entertain us
with reflected-light swordplay. As far
as we can see the meadows are empty,
bushels of grass on mounds above the alluvium.
We lift our glasses. A solitary canoe
is berthing at the jetty.
I don’t have fibromyalgia, you say.
I have cancer. And the silence changes
colour and our eyes won’t meet.

While I waited, I pulled up my collar. My glasses misted over,
I huddled under the awnings of the bakery. The particulates
of freshly baked bread wafted from the open door
every time a client entered or left. 
 
Not sure whether I could escape—taxi or bus, the lack
of visibility was the same. Cold moisture pushed through
the fabric of my woolen coat, climbed up its sleeves, pushed
down from the collar onto my neck and shoulders.
 
Veering between spending money I didn’t have but
at least sitting in the comfortable warmth of a taxi,
and the bus that might never come, 
I remembered a story my husband once told me.
 
One of these foggy London days, at a time when coal fires
had made things even worse, he and other, older boys
lost young charges in the Zoo. After four hours they’d found
eight, and abandoned the search for two more who got home
to their frantic parents at about midnight. He laughed.
I always thought I missed the joke.
                        

I suppose I am just old. But it’s not so much how old I feel,
I feel abandoned. They all went. And it’s not right
that the young ones go first. Just now there
is the last one struggling. My sister's kid. Cancer everywhere.
I know, it’s inevitable. But not the way things
ought to be. A poem won’t do.
 
My Lisa loved it here.
First spooned off the cream from her cappuccino...
That crooked smile of hers, the way she told me off. 
‘Old codger’ she used to call me and wink.
Listened, really listened, when I read her my latest.
She kept her birthmark—just over her lip. 
Could have had it removed. It turned me on, gave
her the coquette air of a bygone era. I think
once they had artificial ones—stuck them on.
 
Sometimes I don’t remember her face.
That makes me miss her even more.
She loved red.
 
And now it’s the damned pandemic. People see
me sitting here and leave again. Social distancing.
As though we hadn’t distanced well before.
When was the last time someone touched me?
 
The day they killed my oldest in Afghanistan.
That was the last straw. Told him he was 
an idiot going to war for the rich and mighty.
Defending the free world? Don’t make me
laugh. Oil and pipelines. Free? They lock you
up when you write the wrong poem.
And then they took my boy.
 
I am glad she didn’t have to live that loss,
the aloneness of old age, the unanswerable
question: What was the point?