Let’s meet was your suggestion, in this poem suddenly made.
That’s the way I read it.
I scribbled polyphony and novel on the board,
that a story could have that crazy assortment of voices.
The many presences stark as tonight’s clear moon,
not even bleary, or enmeshed in a tangle of psyches.
They function as proper voices, removed and distinct. 
You think I’ve forgotten you, your poem attests, disappointed.
You say you can’t forget me, and I don’t know how to read the line.
Are we to meet, and pretend that first meeting never happened?
I can’t remember whether I made myself unlikable,
on purpose because there was so much of you to like.
I’m like that around love, as if I don’t deserve it.
They say it’s because of early denial, the absence of trust.
Like real father figures and reliable mothers, or all of life’s early lies. 
It’s the age, I tell people, that affords you less of a license 
to such belief, that happiness is viable at this late stage.
I thought of writing in a film scene this afternoon.
Was it One True Thing or Brokeback Mountain?
My memory is going, so never mind what happened forty years ago.
Maybe it was you, a stranger looking at me from across the street.
Maybe it was Ayala Triangle Gardens or Marikina Freedom Park.
There is comfort in any conflation, any grasping of a real place.
My memory is going, so never mind what happened two years ago.
I think I saw you in the audience two years back—was it you?
You spread your legs, and leaned back, as if suggesting sex.
You put your arm around your buddy, to pretend you were spoken for.
You looked at me, and wanted me to look back, to say yes.
I’ve wanted to say yes for far too long, and I’ve been saying yes.
It would be nice to have you in my arms on Cavenagh Bridge.
It would be nice to enact your poem, the full romance of its lines. 
It would be nice to tell you something about first love, 
and kiss you on the neck, and let you know this was the vision. 
It is then, when I will wonder again when all this first began.