I Bought the Book He Mentioned Once (Unrequited)

Lyrics

I bought the book you mentioned once.
Just in passing.
At that cafe on Barrow Street.

You were talking about Petrarch.
I didn't know the name.
You said he loved a woman for twenty-one years.
Wrote it all down.
Saw her once.
April sixth.
Good Friday morning.
You said it like it was trivia.
A strange little fact.
I went to The Strand the next day.
Found a used copy of his Canzoniere.
The cover is worn.
Smells like someone else's house.

I read your ghost into every line.
I underline the words I think you would underline.
I am a scholar of an echo.
A historian of a glance.
I write your name in the margins of my Virgil,
because if there is any good in me, it comes from you.

It's not about the poetry, not really.
It's the weight of the book in my hands.
The paper, thin as a moth's wing.
I sit in the chair by the window and imagine the light in Avignon.
The cool stone of the Church of Sainte-Claire.
I try to feel what he felt.
That first hour of the day.
A life cleaved in two by a single look.

I read your ghost into every line.
I underline the words I think you would underline.
I am a scholar of an echo.
A historian of a glance.
I write your name in the margins of my Virgil,
because if there is any good in me, it comes from you.

Today is April the sixth.
Twenty-one months since that day on Barrow Street.
Not years, just months.
But the calendar doesn't care.
The light was removed from the world.
No, that's not right.
The light was never in my world.
It was just a reflection, in a window I was passing.

I close the book.
The dust settles in the quiet.
I bought the book you mentioned.
You've probably forgotten the conversation.
You've probably forgotten my name.