“Well, then, take me there sometime,”
She excitedly replied
To my off-hand observation
Of a “very good pizza place”
Darting past the car window
As she hurtled us through the East Village.
In my memory,
Wind’s rustling my hair,
But, it must be one of memory’s tricks
As New York winters are hardly conducive
To rolled down windows
And truthfully
Our evening’s drinking had blurred
A few details,
A fact we readily confronted the next morning
When we attempted to divine
Where precisely she had parked her car.
The rest of our night was a muddled mixture
Of misguided DVD choices, indigestion,
And chaste slumber despite
My cupping her breasts through a borrowed t-shirt.
“Weirdest OkCupid date ever”
She declared the next morning
Following an extensive critique
Of my dating profile.
A couple weeks later
We tried our hand at platonic
But the timing
Wrecked my follow-through.
So,
I never did take her to that pizza place,
And, in retrospect,
Her spirited entreaty to do so
Was possibly a touch presumptuous for a first date.
Notes:
No, she never returned my REM shirt
(Though, to be fair, she had warned me she wouldn’t);
Yes, we did eventually find her car the next morning;
No,
I cannot take you to that pizza place
At the corner of Bowery & Houston,
It’s been gone for years now.