Post-it Notes

At first they were covered in words: critical diatribes

in small.  Then they took on the look of all that marginalia

you find from the smug graffiti-writing reader:  ‘Foucault!’,

‘evolution’, ‘what?’, or ‘no!’.  Now they’re wordless:

unpenned letters from the past, encrypted

in a knowledge of the reader that was me.

In an old book I see a yellow square, read the part

marked, and am amazed at my predictability.

In a new city and in love, we took a mapless walk

at dawn, choosing our course by instinct, taking

left or right according to our whim, or how the light

was caught.  After time we found coffee and wine,

a waiter who looked like a brother, and a place to talk.

Years later we went back and made the same unchartered

trip, remembering nothing of the things we’d seen,

choosing again without design.  We ended in the same bar

with the same familiar waiter pouring wine, awed and appalled

by our own consistency, but back where we started.

We talk less now—

Leave notes that are no more than signs—

Trust that the old choices hold wordlessly.