Eggs Etc.

I hear her clear her throat

just as I sit down in the restaurant with my daily news and hangover.

I recognize that sound, like a polite ghost in a cartoon

drawing Shaggy from a Scooby-snack and I scan the room.

And there she sits. Looking at me

with wide eyeholes and crooked smile

the same way she did when we kissed a while back

in Dinkytown, between the parked cars on 4th St.

while buses blew force fields to shield us

from the eyes of the fidelity police. Even before

I returned to the house that day

she was already taxiing down the runway, bag under seat

filled with her Dramamine, diaphragm  and Eurail pass.

We said no goodbye on 4th, though it was implied

and only later confirmed from some phone box in London.

Now, here I am with a hankering for coffee and eggs

and greasy beast meat and there’s something

that brought her back to the States and this same nasty diner

where she and I liked to eat after screwing in the sunbulb of dawn.

She’s still like that photo from my brainpan

but crossed with a catcher’s mitt and I know

there’s more to me than there once was,

but all that seems secondary when I find that she and I

are not only in the same country again, but even

within spitting distance. Then,

the waitress is at my table slopping coffee

into a mug and asking What’ll it be, hon?

I think it’s clear that I came here only for the eggs,

but her muffin sure looks good too.

I don’t know what to say.

First published in Thieves Jargon