I recall the enjoyment Walden and I had driving after a rain;
the slick, wet street reflecting,
making everything appear, to an extent and for a time,
as black and white as words on a page.
Walden and I mused over a newspaper we shared;
he admired the plain speech while I lamented the repetition
—always telling the same stories with a different face.
He thought me a cynic while I accused him of romancing,
yet we agreed a paper felt more real than anything a screen could do.
Further down the road Walden thought about remembering,
as he often did, how scent could trigger memories and memories, scent
—the two, it seemed to him,
"were waltzing along the fence of perception.”
Stopping at a graveyard Walden and I
ditched the car to walk, pretending that we were pulling a Robinson
—disappearing to start a new life somewhere,
leaving the keys in the ignition
to say that we didn’t quit, we finished.
Beside a headstone I cracked open a beer
and told how it felt like there two parts of me
(one nihilist, one romantic) and that they always bickered
—feeling déjà vu,
like I was repeating myself, that I said this all before.
Walden chuckled, amused at the idea
—his cologne
adrift in the surrounding air.
