Red. Green./A Poem

She was wrong to think

that his reading one poem

once, decades ago, on the borrowed

third floor of a dreamer’s house,

was an indication.

Wrong to think that he would
read again, or want to,

or ask her to dance,

and mean it, or care

when she said, This book

is for you.  It wasn’t,

he didn’t, he wouldn’t, though

twenty-seven years later

he sliced the red meat

from a tomato and lay it into the sweet

anchovy salt and eighthed

an avocado.  The red

and the green, he said.