Love Poem: How Are You
Bernard Chan Avatar
Written by: Bernard Chan

How Are You

The formality of it stings.
“How are you?” 
Delivered with a self-conscious courtesy and
a poverty of emotion 
calculated to immediately keep 
me at arm’s length, 
fencing herself in.

There was a time when this
same greeting would
have been prefixed with a
velvet-soft “hey” and saturated with 
a low hum of closeness 
that instantly muted the world around us,
drawing me inside the fence with her,
accompanied by a slackening
of features and posture, 
as if the short separations 
demanded by work and 
other humdrum inconveniences 
of daily life were 
reluctant journeys, 
and home was wherever
I happened to be. 

The piano player in a corner of the bar, 
as if sensing the intrusion of 
something buried into the world of the living,
the chance encounter of 
present with its past, 
is now, with a mischievous glint in his eye, 
playing the kind of 
slow, tinkling jazz tune that, 
echoing from many nights past, 
is freighted 
with a desolation of angels.

We're talking like fugitives fleeing our own shadows,
the plastic pleasantries we exchange 
a cover-up,
every word the coded equivalent of 
“don’t go there”, 
slow dancing 
without touching. 

Too soon, or too late, 
we decide it’s time to put an end to the past-present,
like two estranged parents enforcing an 
early curfew on former versions of themselves. 

While we're walking away from each other,
the piano notes waft like wayward stars 
through the door of the bar,
trailing two ghosts who are, 
behind our backs,
eloping into the night.