v. Coda She paused, looking at him for a moment with a smile. ‘My name? I am Mademoiselle Yvonne de Galais…’ Then she was gone.

Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain Fournier

We trudged under the lash of measurement, each pulse a question, Will the next scan be clear? pursued by odds we’d too soon hear Your cancer is past treatment. Against that hour I sifted memory for the clarity a tango with extinction brings: not the last ten winter years when we grew close, chance-met again after half a century, but three months as your subject while you slummed it, a pubescent uptown rose dallying with a bit of rough. I refined myself after that brief encounter, quarried Wordsworth, Eliot, Lowell, Yeats, cast your deities as mine, pictured us kneeling at their shrine, but the conjunctive moment past worshipped alone.

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