At a party in a Spanish kind of tiled house
I met a woman who had won an award
for writing whose second prize
had gone to me. For years
I’d felt a kinship with her in the sharing
of this honor,
and I told her how glad I was to talk with her,
my compatriot of letters,
mentioning of course this award.
But it was nothing
to her, and in fact she didn’t remember it.
I didn’t know what else to talk about.
I looked around us at a room full of hands
moving drinks in tiny, rapid circles—
you know how people do
with their drinks.
Soon after this I became
another person, somebody
I would have brushed off if I’d met him that night,
somebody I never imagined.
People will tell you that it’s awful
to see facts eat our dreams, our presumptions,
but they’re wrong. It is an honor
to learn to replace one hope with another.
It was the only thing that could possibly have persuaded me
that my life is not a lonely story played out
in barrooms before a vast audience of the dead.