Evelyn Lau

Ragtime Opening at Ford Theatre,
May 10, 1998

A year later, I see you
in the theatre lobby at intermission,
your aged face two-faced in the segmented mirror
above the twin staircases. I feel enough
to turn away. Too late.
You've fixed me in your gaze,
and the belling in my chest,
the emptied lungs, the seized throat,
might not be hammering hatred
but the breathlessness of first love.

Then, as if in a movie version
of the moment when lust is sparked,
the crowd dissolves
and we are standing in the stripped room
lovers inhabit, our bodies burning
in a single flare of fury,
and I see: even hatred binds
and union is unbroken.

How have we arrived here,
your face as unknowable to me
as a thief's surprised at the foot of the bed
after he steals in from the window
and I wake from a nightmare
to find a stranger in the room?

-Evelyn Lau