Hello Dolly?

I went to the bars, the music halls and the cafés and none had your face – or your body, for that matter. I went to the dusty Odyssey and swooned 'neath your tower on a horse with an incurable thirst. I swung along crowds in daylight shadows and searched from the neck up.

A gave you a string, too. Over a dozen of them.

So my last port o' call is here on this pier. And here I am, peering at the continents and at the waves and at the – um – water. I'm considering shouting, you know. Shouting a big "Hello?".

Mr. Mister, as they call him, may have, theoretically, squeezed my glum portrait from your wall and held you like a pill and a needle in his white paper teeth. Maybe this braying calf knelt with care 'neath your window and waited with a bell 'till you emerged for the symphony dressed in slimming, sparkling black. He must've carved out his jaw just right. And you must have had one of those flutters and simply forgot to farewell the holed up mailman who was only a downward dig away.

'Twas nothing serious, you know. Sparkling words, you know. The occasional exchange in company, you know.

I guess this is goodbye – though it means less when I say it.