Watching Ourselves 10 Years Ago

We watch a couple talk in the fluorescent glow of the curb.
From inside this diner,

we make a life for them out there.
Say he likes feeling the slight tremor of a
subway in the channels below,

relived not to be underground.

She’s learning French but is disappointed
when she still sounds like herself.
Who knows them better than we do?
They are still young.
We should warn them, we should

chase them before they’re swallowed up
by the next taxi. 
But we don’t.
We lift our spoons up and down again
to the very bottom 
of the bowl, the bottom

where the best soup is,

where it can be eked out,
like a sticky-hot ball of glass from a furnace,

ready for us to blow cool.

We keep the taxi couple,
just because we can.
Because 
they just look so pretty standing there,

and not like us,
who look more like the parents of some serial killer,

asking ourselves, always asking
how all of this could have happened—
perhaps begun that one night
outside a diner,
before watching through the taxi window

a city in full bloom.

— 2009