In that last hour before our ship docks in New York, I wait for that boy to say goodbye.
Surely he will search every deck for me.
Will draw me out of this reverie about last night
in the ballroom where his famous mother
sang in her gleaming gown
and the boy held my hand and stared at me as if
I'd just risen from the dead, and not only then
but the day before too, he gazed open mouthed.
Wasn't that the sign of love so clear, so true as a fog horn?
What a muffin of a thought, larded with hope,
grand with illusions, with what zest
but all of it in danger here in the last hour
when he should be pressing his address into my hand.
Yet there's not a sign of him.
Only 16 and already exhausted by love.
