Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
– Jorge Luis Borges
I said you didn’t need to walk me the block and a half
to my house. It felt a bit old fashioned.
You told me to listen to the leaves rustling beneath
the streetlights in the early summer breeze.
You asked me who my favourite utilitarian philosopher
of the nineteenth century was. It wasn’t a conversation
I wanted to have at midnight on a Friday.
You asked me about my favourite scene from Blackadder.
You drove me to every service station
in town the rainy night I had a craving
for Cherry Coke, then returned my forgotten
umbrella to my doorstep before sunrise.
It was what I expected of you.
There are things we will never understand
about each other – my tendency to wander,
why you’ve never tasted strawberries.
I think we really believed paths that cross once are bound
to do so again through common interest or chance
the day we said goodbye in the shared driveway
and pretended I’d be back and you’d be waiting
to show me the latest philosophy books in your collection,
while I’d made myself at home in your living room
logging onto your laptop with the date of your brother’s
birth – your password for everything, then mine so
I remember it even now, six years after I saw him for the last time,
and Blackadder would resume where we left off
the night we came home early from a party, as was our habit,
your brother just waking, as was his – Hugh Laurie young again
or still and strawberries in season, the elms in full foliage
on the street that joined our flats.
This piece first appeared in Nga Kupu Waikato: an anthology of Waikato poetry.